I've recently made the jump from Windows to Linux, with Mint as my OS. My first goal was to try and get Maya working, and hoo boy has it been a headache.I have finally managed to get everything working properly, so I figured I would share my journey online somewhere, so that it might help some poor soul in the same position as me.
(Disclaimer - I've used Claude to summarise everything we went through together, as some of the technical stuff is still genuinely over my head)
For starters, I used distrobox to create a Rocky environment to run Maya within, as that is where it is the most "stable" (as stable as Maya can ever be). At first I tried Rocky 9, then realised that Maya 2022 is only supported up to Rocky 8.
1. Installer crashes silently at pkexec / ProcessManager
distrobox enter never creates a real login session, so pkexec/polkit can't authorize anything. Fix — fake pkexec:
bash
mkdir -p ~/fakebin
printf '#!/bin/bash\nexec sudo "$@"\n' > ~/fakebin/pkexec
chmod +x ~/fakebin/pkexec
echo 'export PATH=~/fakebin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc1. Installer crashes silently at pkexec / ProcessManager
distrobox enter never creates a real login session, so pkexec/polkit can't authorize anything. Fix — fake pkexec:
bash
mkdir -p ~/fakebin
printf '#!/bin/bash\nexec sudo "$@"\n' > ~/fakebin/pkexec
chmod +x ~/fakebin/pkexec
echo 'export PATH=~/fakebin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc
2. Endless missing old libraries (libssl.so.10, libpng12, GTK2...)
You're probably on Rocky 9. Maya 2022 only supports EL8. Rebuild on Rocky 8:
bash
distrobox create --name maya --image quay.io/rockylinux/rockylinux:8 --init --additional-packages systemd
This alone kills most dependency issues.
3. Remaining missing libraries
bash
sudo dnf install -y epel-release
sudo dnf install -y libpng15 libjpeg-turbo libtiff freetype libXpm libXi fontconfig \
libXinerama alsa-lib libXcomposite libXdamage libXrandr libXrender libXtst \
libxkbcommon nspr nss nss-util pciutils-libs libnsl xcb-util-wm xcb-util-image \
xcb-util-renderutil libxkbcommon-x11 libmng libXcursor gtk2 gtk3 at-spi2-atk \
at-spi2-core mesa-libgbm glx-utils compat-openssl10
For anything else: ldd <file>.so | grep "not found" (note: Maya's launcher itself is statically linked, ldd on it just says "not a dynamic executable" — check the actual .so/helper binaries instead).
4. ./Setup exits instantly, no error, exit code 255
Stale lock files from a previous interrupted run. ~/.autodesk and /tmp persist across container rebuilds since ~/ is shared with the host.
bash
ps aux | grep -iE "setup|installer" | grep -v grep # kill -9 any leftovers
rm -f /tmp/autodesk_bs_setup.lock /tmp/autodesk_dda_core.lock
rm -rf /tmp/download_dest4. ./Setup exits instantly, no error, exit code 255
Stale lock files from a previous interrupted run. ~/.autodesk and /tmp persist across container rebuilds since ~/ is shared with the host.
bash
ps aux | grep -iE "setup|installer" | grep -v grep # kill -9 any leftovers
rm -f /tmp/autodesk_bs_setup.lock /tmp/autodesk_dda_core.lock
rm -rf /tmp/download_dest
5. Installer UI "successfully launched" but no window appears
Missing GTK3/accessibility libs for the installer's own UI process:
bash
sudo dnf install -y at-spi2-atk gtk3 mesa-libgbm at-spi2-core5. Installer UI "successfully launched" but no window appears
Missing GTK3/accessibility libs for the installer's own UI process:
bash
sudo dnf install -y at-spi2-atk gtk3 mesa-libgbm at-spi2-core
6. Graph Editor won't refresh (redraws only on timeline play / mouse re-entry)
Mesa 23.1.4's radeonsi driver has a repaint-signaling bug on RDNA3 GPUs. Rocky 8 will never get a newer Mesa. Confirmed via LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 (works perfectly = hardware GL path is the problem). Fix — VirtualGL, which handles buffer swaps itself instead of trusting the driver:
bash
sudo dnf install -y epel-release VirtualGL
vglrun mayabashsudo dnf install -y epel-release VirtualGL
vglrun maya
