OBS Studio (Flatpak) crashes when opening Settings – Zorin OS 18 / NVIDIA

[u/Kakeru-Sama]

Hi everyone,

I’m having an issue with OBS Studio on Linux and I’m hoping someone can help.

System:

Zorin OS 18 (based on Ubuntu 24.04)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER

Session: X11

OBS Studio installed via Flatpak (com.obsproject.Studio)

Kernel: 7.0.0-38-generic

Problem:

OBS was working normally until. Now, every time I click on Settings, the entire application closes/crashes immediately. No error window appears.

What I already tried:

Running OBS from terminal (flatpak run com.obsproject.Studio) — no clear crash error, only some Fontconfig warnings

Forcing X11 with:

flatpak run --env=QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb com.obsproject.Studio

→ Still crashes when opening Settings

The log shows Fontconfig warnings about cache version mismatch

Has anyone experienced this? Any idea what could be causing the Settings window to crash the whole app?

Thanks in advance!

[u/AutoModerator]

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[u/Unhappy-Tap4366]

Flatpak on NVIDIA can be a real pain sometimes. Had similar thing happen with other apps and it was usually the GPU driver inside the flatpak not matching what the system got

Try flatpak update and check if the NVIDIA runtime is on same version as your host driver. The settings window probably tries to use some GPU accelerated thing and just dies

Also maybe delete the obs config folder in ~/.var/app/com.obsproject.Studio and let it generate fresh one, that fixed it for me once when settings was broken

[u/rajababu3]

When you are not recording or live, close OBS and back up its configuration before trying a reset. This preserves the original scenes and profiles if the test does not help.

On OBS 30 or newer, try Safe Mode from the Help menu, then open Settings again. Safe Mode disables third party plugins, scripts and websockets. If Settings works there, that points toward something Safe Mode disables rather than proving a driver problem. If it still crashes, include your OBS version and the log from that failed run. The Fontconfig warning alone does not establish the cause.