main() creates an instance of Application which is a QGUIApplication. Without a valid X server, this will segfault. How to reproduce: export DISPLAY= pulseview --version How this can potentially be fixed: pulseview --version -platform offscreen or pulseview --version -platform minimal However, it's unclear at this point how exactly the -platform paramter prevents the xcb/windows/etc. platform plugins from being loaded and loading offscreen or minimal instead. There's no documented API to perform this, see https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qpa.html