Spotify no longer starts after a hostname change (Linux)

The symptom

Spotify (official .deb package, spotify-client 1.2.95, Debian 13) no longer opens. No window, no message. From the launcher, nothing happens. From a terminal:

$ spotify
$ echo $?
1

With --enable-logging=stderr, a single line is printed:

INFO:cef/libcef/common/crash_reporting.cc:209] Crash reporting enabled for process: browser

Then the process exits with code 1.

False leads

• The GPU: --disable-gpu, --in-process-gpu, --ozone-platform=x11|wayland, --use-gl=egl change nothing, the exit code stays 1.
• The package: no recent Spotify update, the binary is intact.
• The config: ~/.config/spotify/prefs is readable and consistent.

A test with a clean profile (XDG_CONFIG_HOME and XDG_CACHE_HOME pointed to a temporary folder) did start. So the problem came from the existing profile, not from the installation.

The cause

Spotify is a CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) application. Like Chromium, it only allows one instance per profile, with three symbolic links in ~/.cache/spotify:

SingletonLock   -> huntervcx-imac151-10745
SingletonCookie -> 11476635766705238864
SingletonSocket -> /tmp/org.chromium.Chromium.sCe4Pv/SingletonSocket

The content of SingletonLock is <hostname>-<pid>. At startup, Chromium reads this link:

• if the hostname matches the current machine, it checks whether the PID is still running and takes over the lock if it is dead;
• if the hostname differs, it assumes the profile is used by another machine (profile on a network share) and leaves everything alone.

Here, the lock had been left the day before by a session that hadn’t closed the app properly, under the old hostname huntervcx-imac151. In the meantime, the machine had been renamed iMac-Arthur. Spotify therefore saw a lock from “another machine” and quit silently.

The fix

Make sure no Spotify is running, then delete the three links:

pgrep -af spotify
rm ~/.cache/spotify/SingletonLock \
   ~/.cache/spotify/SingletonCookie \
   ~/.cache/spotify/SingletonSocket

These files contain only the lock: no account, no track cache, no preferences. Spotify starts normally again.

Key takeaways

• Changing the hostname while a Chromium/Electron/CEF app has crashed or is still open leaves an orphaned lock that the app can no longer recover from.
• The same symptom can occur with Chrome, Edge, VS Code, Discord, etc.: run ls -la on the profile folder and look at the Singleton* files.
• An exit code of 1 with no message is often a lock or a profile issue, not a GPU problem.
• If you change the hostname, close your applications first, or clean up the Singleton* files afterwards.