Anki is installed on my laptop. It always worked perfectly, but I can’t open it anymore. What can I do?
2 Likes
If Anki fails to launch and freezes at “Starting Anki…” or silently crashes, the cause is often a broken or outdated graphics driver—particularly with AMD Radeon GPUs. Anki’s GUI uses OpenGL via Qt, which can silently fail if hardware rendering is unsupported or broken. Solution:
- Update your GPU driver with a clean install and restart your computer
- To make the workaround permanent (if needed):
- Open System Properties → Environment Variables.
- Under User variables, click New.
- Set:
- Variable name:
QT_OPENGL - Variable value:
software - Click OK and restart your system.
- Once the driver is updated and Anki launches normally:
- Go back to Environment Variables and delete
QT_OPENGLto re-enable GPU acceleration.
This worked on a Windows 11 PC.
credit: ChatGPT
This might work, but it’s best to use the official way as outlined in the manual:
(This manual entry above can be accessed from the troubleshooting entry I sent earlier as well)
Did you write this and only got formatting touchups from ChatGPT?
Edit: Okay, so it’s a solution that worked for you but you got it from chatGPT. Sounds fair.
1 Like
Yup! It’s been a frustrating problem and I just hoped the solution ChatGPT provided me would help other folks.
Before this solution, I was able to open Anki through Python as described in the Anki FAQs (Running from Python), but this just made things much more convenient.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.