Running Blender on ChromeOS
This short article explains how to run the latest Blender versions on ChromeOS devices — Chromebooks, Chromeboxes.
Latest Chromebook (and especially Chromebook Plus) devices have quite capable GPUs and enough memory to run Blender with good rendering performance. However, the drivers may be buggy and cause some issues.
Blender requires support for OpenGL 4.3 or Vulkan 1.3. However, the hardware-accelerated OpenGL backend provided by Crostini (virtual machine powering Linux Development Environment feature) lacks features needed to run Blender (namely proper amount of SSBO binding locations). This makes Vulkan the only option to operate Blender with decent performance (as software, non-accelerated OpenGL rendering is really slow).
Follow these steps to install and run Blender with Vulkan support:
- Install the Linux Development Environment
- Activate "Crostini GPU Support" using
chrome://flags - Download Blender distribution from the official website and unpack it inside the Linux Development Environment
- Go to the unpacked folder
- Run Blender with the Vulkan backend enabled:
./blender --gpu-backend vulkan
Blender 5.3+ uses the Vulkan backend by default, so there is no need to specify it in the command line.
Known Bugs
Missing window decorations — reported in Blender Issues and Chromium Bugs.
