The MATLAB Linux installer (at least on Fedora) seems to be spectacularly bad at it's job (not surprising considering they think indicies should start at 1).
This gist serves as a quide to fix the dreaded error 5201 and get on with your day.
First, an explaination: MATLAB will crash after ~2 minutes of appearing to be working fine, however in the bottom left it will simply say initializing
and eventually the app will crash with no warnings of any kind.
if you run matlab
from a console you get a glimpse of the problem:
❯ matlab