Running Spartan'24 by Wavefunction on Fedora 43

Trying to get Spartan'24 running on the latest Fedora was a nightmare

As a computational chemist, and an ardent microsoft hater, it's important to me to be able to run computational chemistry software on alternative operating systems. MacOS is fine and dandy, but the prices of capable Apple hardware is insane-- My 16GB Mac Mini was almost $1000, and it doesn't come close to my Ryzen 7 with 80GB of DDR4 (that I was able to scavenge before prices went up).

This only leaves me with one option really-- Linux. I'm widely a linux user. My server and intel laptop run Arch, I have a NixOS test rig, and I run Fedora for my desktop PC. To pick a distro to run Spartan is kind of a tough question, because once my support runs out, I will be tied to that operating system unless I decide to pay for a new license.

Wavefunction only officially supports Ubuntu 24.04, some flavours of debian, and archaic versions of Fedora and Red Hat, but they leave a footnote that "newer versions of Fedora should work"

What follows is my experience trying to get it to work.

What is Spartan again?

It's an incredible piece of software really. It's one of the only computational chemistry packages to be both feature-rich, and user friendly in a way that's really conducive to productivity. Gaussian is super-duper powerful, but lacking in user-friendly-ness. Orca is also really powerful, but definitely leaves a lot to be desired in terms of UX. Spartan is a really nice middle-ground, and their support team is really friendly. Also, you can get heavily discounted personal licenses, if you claim to be a starving graduate student (which I am).

What issues does it face on Fedora 43?

When I tried to run Spartan'24 on Fedora (KDE using Wayland, btw), the logo flashed briefly, and then a blank window spawned that filled the whole screen with an unclickable nightmare that forced me to hard reboot my PC. I was left with one clue: the window had the default Wayland icon.

This lead me to believe it was an issue with Wayland. I tried forcing it to run in Xwayland using GDK_BACKEND=x11. This got me a little further. The icon loaded properly. But still, I thought it wasn't loading all of the right X11 libraries to actually get the full UI.

Next, I tried booting into my Mac Mini, and used X11 forwarding in SSH to forward spartan to XQuartz. This was a horrible hack, but it was also a success! The full spartan gui loaded-- except for the calculations dialog (the most important dialog in the entire app).

I knew now it was an Xwayland legacy compatibility issue. Sigh, ugh.

Anyways, much troubleshooting later, and I discovered the right magic keywords to use.

#!/bin/bash
export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb
export __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=mesa
export LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1
spartan24

(it also seemed to have an issue with the proprietary NVIDIA driver working for my RTX5060).

This finally got the app to work properly, but it was stuck in fullscreen. I ended up having to use a KDE special window setting to force all sp_gui processes to use windowed mode instead of fullscreen.

Ugh... So many hacks. But now I have Spartan'24 fully working in Fedora43 with KDE Plasma.