I stumbled across this thread when researching a similar issue with torsocks, and thought I'd add my 2 eurocents (I know that Rosika has been active here fairly recently).

First of all, I don't think the problem ever had anything to do with installing torsocks outside of the distro's package management.

And of course tor needs to be running before launching torsocks, that has been established.

But this:
In my layman opinion, that isn't a bug in torsocks.
It just tries to isolate the application's network requests as much as possible, and it cannot always know when a certain syscall is safe, and when it has the potential to invalidate the network isolation.
So it errs on the side of caution.

I have written a wrapper around torsocks and experimented with it for hours, and got all sorts of syscall errors and programs segfaulting as a result. In the end I accepted that that's just the way it is.

The way I see it, if you need to permanently run a complex application through TOR you have to set it up manually and very carefully (that's what Tor Browser Bundle is essentially); torsocks OTOH is a handy, quick solution, but its downside is that it does not always work, esp. with GUI applications.

Anyhow, here is the repository that contains the mytorsocks.sh script, and here's an excerpt from the README:

Hello ondoho,

how nice of you to inform me of your latest findings. Thanks a lot.

Fine. That´s good to know.

Yes, that coincides with my experience of certain GUI applications.

Thanks for providing the link.

In the meantime I´m on Lubuntu bionic and don´t have torsocks any longer on the system.
In a few months´ time (next April) I´ll have to do a fresh/clean install as bionic for Lubuntu will reach EOL.
Perhaps I´m giving it a new try then or experiment within a VM.

Thanks again for all your help.It´s highly appreciated.

All the best for the New Year.
Rosika

Yeah, Guten Rutsch!