Spent several weeks banging my head against the wall with this problem. When trying to start "atom" it just never appeared. When trying with "atom -f" (to run in the foreground) I would get the following error messages:
[ERROR:browser_main_loop.cc(231)] Running without the SUID sandbox! See https:
[WARNING:audio_manager.cc(314)] Multiple instances of AudioManager detected
[WARNING:audio_manager.cc(314)] Multiple instances of AudioManager detected
[ERROR:browser_main_parts.cc(126)] X IO error received (X server probably went away)
I focused on the first error message for a long time and found all sorts of red herrings, closed bug reports and no actual solutions. Finally it dawned on me that the actual problem was the LAST error message. I access my desktop via X2GO and therefore have a pretty special DISPLAY environment variable. Maybe that had something to do with it?
https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/4360# cp /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1 /opt/atom
# sed -i 's/BIG-REQUESTS/_IG-REQUESTS/' /opt/atom/libxcb.so.1
...and suddenly atom worked.