MATLAB error message during startup on Linux

If you install your MATLAB at /usr/local/, you may not be able to start MATLAB (getting a long error message saying that MATLAB is exiting with a fatal error and no GUI shows up).

Alternatively MATLAB may start with the error message "The desktop configuration was not saved successfully".

In these cases you could try to change the owner of your ~/.matlab folder (change twang to your Linux username):

sudo chown -R twang ~/.matlab

This should fix the problem.