Any luck running OpenGL programs?

[ilyagr]

I have been able to run X11 programs on an Orbstack Linux machine by installing XQuartz, running xhost + in an xterm from XQuartz, and then using¹ DISPLAY=host.internal:0 inside the Orbstack machine. This can run, for example, xeyes. (You should probably run xhost - when you are done for a bit more security. TODO: there are ways to make X authorization work, removing the xhost + hole; I might edit this message if I remember a short one).

However, I have not been able to run OpenGL apps like alacritty or ghostty or glxgears, not even with software rendering. They all report errors similar to this one:

error(gtk_surface): surface failed to realize: Unable to create a GL context
warning(gtk_surface): this error is usually due to a driver or gtk bug
warning(gtk_surface): this is a common cause of this issue: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4950

I've tried this on Arch (sudo pacman -S alacritty xorg-xeyes, then get xeyes to work with DISPLAY=host.internal:0 via e.g. xhost + in the XQuartz terminal, then try alacritty) and on Nixos.

I've tried options like LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=true GALLIUM_DRIVER=llvmpipe, they did not help.

I think the cause might be that it's trying to use XQuarz's OpenGL implementation, and it's really old. (I will edit this if I find the discussion that led me to this suspicion)

In any case, has anyone had more luck with this than I had?

Footnotes

1. Without setting DISPLAY, I get the message along the lines of Error: Can't open display: /private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.wcQFbrEIrY/org.xquartz:0. I wish programs inside Orbstack could just automagically open that DISPLAY, since it seems that Orbstack goes through the trouble of finding the XQuartz's display and setting DISPLAY to /private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.wcQFbrEIrY/org.xquartz:0. ↩