stigersh
Houdini gets stuck on startup totally not responding. I have a MacOS Big Sur with M1 chip.
I assume this on a Mac Mini or iMac?
Here's what I suspect -- Houdini Apprentice calls home to get an authorization from SideFX servers directly (in Canada I presume?), and sometimes their servers are not online or they're having some issues. I had problems in the past launching Houdini Apprentice which would absolutely not work one day, and the next day launched without issues.
The paid versions of Houdini don't seem to suffer from this since I suspect they store the license information locally and only poll the servers occasionally to see if the license is still valid.
I could be wrong of course, but that's the only explanation I can think of for this behavior.
I'm running Houdini Indie on an M1 Mac Book Air and it runs fine without any issues except some ARM incompatibility which typically doesn't impact me.