Anki is installed on my laptop. It always worked perfectly, but I can’t open it anymore. What can I do?
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If Anki fails to launch and freezes at “Starting Anki…” or silently crashes, the cause is often a broken or outdated graphics driver—particularly with AMD Radeon GPUs.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.
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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.