In the context the designer launcher is creating the new Designer instance, there’s an environment variable set with a non-ASCII name. That’s pretty unusual, especially since you’re encountering this on different machines; maybe it’s something being provided by your AD domain or other Windows setup?
If the Ubuntu install has a desktop environment, you could try launching a designer there. You can see the names and values of the default environment variables on Windows pretty easily:
https://www.architectryan.com/2018/08/31/how-to-change-environment-variables-on-windows-10/