The title sounds quite nice doesn't it? It has a nice alliteration however as beautiful as it sounds, it's not stable at all. I know by trying to run Houdini on Arch and on top of that something like Hyprland, I am way out of the suggested OS / nvidia driver version etc. But I know I am not the only one with the desire to take such adventures so I want to know if anyone has succeeded in running Houdini 20.0.688 on Hyprland? Here are my results -

Linux version - Arch linux stable kernel
Driver version - NVIDIA 550
WM - Hyprland

Houdini opens, but the UI flickers a lot, the viewport doesn't flicker so it's not that bad, however it crashes every 3-5 minutes. Since other apps like Brave browser, spotify, discord also flicker and other users reported the same, I decided to wait for a better nvidia driver.

The better nvidia driver came yesterday, 21st May, 2024 albeit in Beta stage, nvidia driver 555 promises to solve a lot of Hyprland / wayland issues in general. So i tried that out and here is the result -

Linux version - Arch Linux stable kernel
Driver version - NVIDIA 555 Beta
WM - Hyprland

This time the experience was a lot better, none of the apps or Houdini were flickering, everything is smooth, I can resize the UI or change them as fast as I want etc. However Houdini still crashes, especially if I click on the toggle hide / ghost option for the geometry on the top right hand side of the viewport, so if anyone is willing to replicate you can either wait for 5-10 mins or just open houdini and click there.

I have saved 2-3 logs, and I showed them to the currently most intelligent brain in the world, chatGpt. According to the beautiful voiced AI all the logs point to error caused by opencl / nvidia drivers. I can see the mentioning of nvidia driver version in the logs however I am not sure what's the problem and if there is any easy way to solve.

So if some sidefx magician or any magician can take a look at my logs and suggest something, I will be thankful, I am attaching my logs.

Also if someone in the future stumbles on to this post, your bravery is commendable, you chose to install Houdini in the most unstable environment possible and decided to not have a life. Long live the rule breakers.

Thank you

Also tried this,
latest arch updates and nvidia drivers seems to add stability for houdini,
but still partial gui crashes

- UI desync (black panels, redraw stalls)
- Floating windows freezing or not closable
- Cursor warping across screens causing drop-downs to glitch
- Occasional GPU channel hangs (Xid 69 from NVIDIA driver)

probably due to Houdini using Qt5 with OpenGL, not yet fully Wayland-compatible.
Tried XWayland, same glitches (did improve with latest arch / nvidia updates).

First workaround was to run houdini in a dedicated x11 shell like XCFE - no issues with houdini.

So to keep it inside your Hyprland session, run Houdini in an X11 sandbox via Xephyr

minimal setup:


launch Script to set custom options only for houdini:
~/bin/houdini-xephyr


make the script executable and run to start houdini,
it will open in a wayland window, fullscreen (see launch script options) and floating above other wayland windows, so no tiling, but can be send to different workspaces across monitors

Overall - it seems to perform best on hyprland (even with x11 xephyr sandbox) - less powerdraw on GPU's for viewport rendering compared to xcfe or windows.
And faster sim calculations / caching.

Be advised that this is minimal solution, closing the houdini window will not close Xephyr - so I just pkill it.