Chromium

Installation

NixOS

Add chromium to systemPackages.

Accelerated video playback

Make sure Accelerated Video Playback is setup on the system properly. Check chrome://gpu to see if Chromium has enabled hardware acceleration.

If accelerated video playback is not working, check relevant flags at chrome://flags, or enable them using the cli:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    (chromium.override {
      commandLineArgs = [
        "--enable-features=AcceleratedVideoEncoder"
        "--ignore-gpu-blocklist"
        "--enable-zero-copy"
      ];
    })
  ];
}

In some cases, chrome://gpu will show Video Decode as enabled, but Video Acceleration Information as blank, with chrome://media-internals using FFmpeg Video Decoder (software decoding). If this happens, try to enable the following features:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    (chromium.override {
      commandLineArgs = [
        "--enable-features=AcceleratedVideoEncoder,VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs,VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,Vulkan,DefaultANGLEVulkan,VulkanFromANGLE"
        "--enable-features=VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,VaapiVideoDecoder,PlatformHEVCDecoderSupport"
        "--enable-features=UseMultiPlaneFormatForHardwareVideo"
        "--ignore-gpu-blocklist"
        "--enable-zero-copy"
      ];
    })
  ];
}

Enabling native Wayland support

You can turn on native Wayland support in all chrome and most electron apps by setting an environment variable: environment.sessionVariables.NIXOS_OZONE_WL = "1".

Enabling DRM (Widevine support)

By default, chromium does not support playing DRM protected media. However, there is a build time flag to include the unfree Widevine blob from nixpkgs:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    (chromium.override { enableWideVine = true; })
  ];
}

KeePassXC support in Flatpak

To enable browser integration between KeePassXC and Chromium-based browsers when running in Flatpak, configure the following filesystem access:

# NativeMessagingHost directory (browser-specific)
# Brave Browser
xdg-config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/NativeMessagingHosts:ro
# Chromium
xdg-config/chromium/NativeMessagingHosts:ro
# Google Chrome
xdg-config/google-chrome/NativeMessagingHosts:ro

# KeePassXC server socket and Nix store
xdg-run/app/org.keepassxc.KeePassXC/org.keepassxc.KeePassXC.BrowserServer
/nix/store:ro

Using libc memory allocator

Chromium may not work when an alternative system-wide memory allocator like scudo is used. To use libc on Chromium, the following firejail wrap is required:

programs.firejail = {
  enable = true;
  wrappedBinaries = {
    chromium = {
      executable = "${pkgs.chromium}/bin/chromium-browser";
      profile = "${pkgs.firejail}/etc/firejail/chromium-browser.profile";
      extraArgs = [
        "--blacklist=/etc/ld-nix.so.preload"
      ];
    };
  };
};