I recently updated my Windsurf installation on my Ubuntu 24.04 laptop and it completly stopped working.

To debug what was happening I needed to run this command:

windsurf --verbose

I got this output:

~$ windsurf --verbose
[16546:0303/214420.288495:FATAL:setuid_sandbox_host.cc(158)] The SUID sandbox helper binary was found, but is not configured correctly. Rather than run without sandboxing I'm aborting now. You need to make sure that /usr/share/windsurf/chrome-sandbox is owned by root and has mode 4755.

The solution

the verbose info led my to the fix for this. I needed to run these commands in my terminal, and voilá, Windsurf is working again:

sudo chmod 4755 /usr/share/windsurf/chrome-sandbox

sudo chown root /usr/share/windsurf/chrome-sandbox

Hope this works for you too.