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=VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL"
        "--ignore-gpu-blocklist"
        "--enable-zero-copy"
      ];
    })
  ];
}

Gnome Shell extensions

Gnome Shell extensions can be enabled with enableGnomeExtensions = true. It is a mozilla plugin, therefore it does not work currently with Chromium.

Enabling native Wayland support

Since Nixos 22.05 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" (see notable changes)

In earlier versions you can enable wayland support by setting the appropriate command-line flags:

nixpkgs.config.chromium.commandLineArgs = "--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland";

Overriding Chromium

Note: This section was never properly tested. Please update it accordingly if you notice issues with the examples and feel free to extend it.

To create a customized Chromium the following approach can be used:

chromium.mkDerivation (base: { name = "my-chromium"; gnFlags = { test_flag = 42; }; })

It should also be possible to override a Chromium attribute using

chromium.browser.overrideAttrs ...

.