Problem with Greek letters in plots

[jrkrideau]

I was reading this post

Mu is rendered as just an "m" in pdf

and thought i would try @ startz solution

library(latex2exp)
x  <-   1
y <-   1
plot(x,y,xlab=TeX(paste("a","$\\mu$","b")))

However I am getting

plot(x,y, xlab=TeX(paste("a","\\mu","b")))
Error in title(...) : invalid use of -956 < 0 in 'X11_MetricInfo'

A simple example using expression, and without *(latex2exp* gives the same result in a new RStudio session and in an external R terminal session.

set.seed(1) # for reproducible, pseudo-random numbers
betas <- rnorm(1000)
hist(betas, main = expression(beta))
Error in title(main = main, sub = sub, xlab = xlab, ylab = ylab, ...) :
invalid use of -946 < 0 in 'X11_MetricInfo'

  sessionInfo()

R version 4.1.2 (2021-11-01)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 21.10

Matrix products: default
BLAS: /usr/local/lib/R/lib/libRblas.so
LAPACK: /usr/local/lib/R/lib/libRlapack.so

locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C LC_TIME=en_CA.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
[5] LC_MONETARY=en_CA.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8 LC_PAPER=en_CA.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C
[9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C LC_MEASUREMENT=en_CA.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.1.2 tools_4.1.2

I don't really have any reason to use Greek letters in plots and have no idea how to troubleshoot this.