Hi, and welcome!
There's no mention in the project's website about whether it supports Wayland or Xorg, but I found an issue reported that only occurred in Wayland.
I'd suggest trying to switch between Wayland (the default) and Xorg to see if it makes any difference. To do that, you need to logout of your account and select it from the little wheel icon at the lower left. Read this post for a bit more detail:
If this makes no difference, try running variety not on the background but directly on the command line by running the variety command. If there are any errors, they might appear there and give some clues.