Sometimes boinc-manager will refuse to start. It's not just an individual launch, it will refuse to start until I reboot or at least log out and back in. Running it as a different user works though. It doesn't give any error messages or terminal output, even if I add --verbose, and it doesn't seem like it crashes, it just completely refuses to run. It seems to exit with code 0377. It may have something to do with "/home/linus/bin/boincperm &> /dev/null &" being in .profile, as I haven't experienced it when that's not there (maybe it causes something weird to happen to the X-server). However it only happens sometimes, and without that the idle detection doesn't work. I'm on OpenSUSE Leap 42.2.

There is a lockfile generated in your home directory that is sometimes not deleted when the Manager is closed. So next time you can't start the Manager check in your home directory if there is a file called "BOINC Manager-{username}" and delete it. That should fix the issue. This is a known problem on Linux.

OK, that works. I feel like it should give an error message though, instead of just silently refusing to run.

This lockfile should not be there in the first place and it was already fixed on Mac but not yet ported to Linux.