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 latest Blender versions with good rendering performance. However, the drivers might 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 normal 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 environment
- Go to the unpacked folder
- Run Blender with Vulkan backend enabled:
./blender --gpu-backend vulkan
Known Bugs
Missing window decorations — reported in Blender Issues and Chromium Bugs.
