I recently wanted to check whether Sublime Merge could run inside an Ubuntu 26.06 WSLC container (I’ve already successfully tested running Weston and Chrome in this environment).
One factor to consider is that the container runtime has stricter security controls than standard WSL, where Sublime runs without any issues.
The installation process uses the “keyring” method to enhance security and completes without any specific problems.
However, the application fails to launch—silently and immediately—returning error 134.
The following issues are encountered:
-
Gtk:ERROR:…/…/…/gtk/gtkiconhelper.c:495:ensure_surface_for_gicon:
assertion failed (error == NULL) - Load icon failure: /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/scalable/status/image-missing.svg
If I run:
bwrap --unshare-all --ro-bind / / /bin/true
The result is:
bwrap: pivot_root: Operation not permitted
# Install the required tools
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y ca-certificates curl
# Install the official signing key in a dedicated keyring
sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://download.sublimetext.com/sublimehq-pub.gpg \
| sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/sublimehq-pub.asc > /dev/null
sudo chmod 0644 /etc/apt/keyrings/sublimehq-pub.asc
# Add the stable repository, restricting trust to this signing key
echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/sublimehq-pub.asc] https://download.sublimetext.com/ apt/stable/' \
| sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sublime-merge.list
# Install Sublime Merge
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y sublime-merge
# Check the installed version
smerge --version
# Launch as the regular user, without sudo
smerge
command -v bwrap
bwrap --unshare-all --ro-bind / / /bin/true
echo "Result code : $?"