Annoying malfunctions that are currently unsolvable by IT although they are objectively bad problems

Software

Matlab dl_allocate_tls_init bug

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There's a bug in Matlab releases after 9.13 (after R2022b) which causes this message in the terminal during crashes:

Inconsistency detected by ld.so: ../elf/dl-tls.c: 574: _dl_allocate_tls_init:
Assertion listp != NULL failed!. 

The bug is only known to be triggered when Matlab is being used graphically (e.g. together with its GUI; without the -nojvm parameter). Two solutions are possible:

• Use Matlab without GUI:
  user@host > MATLAB matlab -nojvm
• Use an older Matlab release. Find out using this command:
  user@host > MATLAB --help

Matlab created or tries to create a Folder .MathWorks in your home directory

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Mathworks invented some Matlab-related "agent" which is supposed to run in your context when you use Matlab. However, this agent wants to copy its runtime environment to your home directory (600MB per computer it's running on!). To prevent that, IT modified the institute-specific startup wrapper to detect traces of the agent, demanding you to remove the folder before continuing.

You might notice this error message upon Matlab startup:

mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/data/hu_username/.MathWorks’: Not a directory

Please ignore it.