Alex Majewski

I'm glad you were able to sort it out Last tip just in case you missed it: remember there are two types of Houdini, regular one and qt5 build. I don't know where we're standing at right now, but in the past qt5 was the version that worked better with Wayland. And Houdini 20.5.X QT6 was working extremely well. Qt5 version (and 20.5 QT6) is available right next to the regular one. QT6 uses PySide6 and QT5 uses PySide2 which will be important for your addons.

When you go to your system login screen, can you switch to X11? Bottom left from the screenshots that I'm seeing online. There should be a dropdown with a list of Wayland and X11. First I'd make sure Houdini starts up on X11. If it does, the error is likely related to Wayland.

As for your error, I don't actually know, but I'm seeing OpenCL and OpenGL in there and those two have been a problem for me multiple times with Houdini. It's possible you might be missing some nvidia packages or environment variables.

No, that's just how Linux is. You have a bunch of libraries floating around that are shared by programs and you need to make sure they're there. Usually there aren't that many, but Houdini has a broad range of abilities and uses a lot of them. There are different workarounds for it like Flatpak or even Nix that behave as you described, but you're not going to be able to use those now.

The list is available here [www.sidefx.com]

But as you can see, Arch-based distros aren't officially supported. That only means you need to figure things out yourself, don't worry. Houdini will work on CachyOS.

Here are our Arch equivalents that I used and they seem to work:

If you install these, I believe Houdini should boot up and let you click things. Lastly, installing X11 is simple and you can switch between Wayland and X11 on the login screen at any moment. Installing X11 usually requires just a couple of packages, something like this for Plasma:
(Warning: I've never actually used Plasma, I don't know if the above will work for you. I use i3wm and all I need to install is "i3 xorg-server" to make it happen)