Problem
Omarchy's default chromium-flags.conf doesn't include VA-API flags, so hardware video decode/encode falls back to software rendering on Intel GPUs. This causes unnecessary CPU load, high temperatures, and fan noise — especially during video calls (Teams, Meet) and video streaming.
On a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 (Lunar Lake), a simple Teams meeting pushes the CPU to 80°C with fans at ~7000 RPM. The Intel iHD driver fully supports VA-API (H264, HEVC, VP9, AV1), but Chromium doesn't use it without explicit flags.
Proposed change
Add these flags to the default chromium-flags.conf:
--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecodeLinuxGL,VaapiVideoEncoder
--enable-gpu-rasterization
--enable-zero-copy
--ignore-gpu-blocklist
This would also benefit the Electron flag files (electron-flags.conf, etc.) since Electron apps like Teams and Spotify have the same issue.
Why it's not enabled by default
Chromium disables hardware acceleration on Linux by default due to driver compatibility concerns across the wide variety of GPU drivers. Since Omarchy targets a known setup (Arch + Intel/AMD), it should be safe to enable by default.
Verification
After adding the flags, hardware acceleration can be verified in Chromium at chrome://gpu — look for "Video Decode: Hardware accelerated" and "Video Encode: Hardware accelerated".
Problem
Omarchy's default
chromium-flags.confdoesn't include VA-API flags, so hardware video decode/encode falls back to software rendering on Intel GPUs. This causes unnecessary CPU load, high temperatures, and fan noise — especially during video calls (Teams, Meet) and video streaming.On a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 (Lunar Lake), a simple Teams meeting pushes the CPU to 80°C with fans at ~7000 RPM. The Intel iHD driver fully supports VA-API (H264, HEVC, VP9, AV1), but Chromium doesn't use it without explicit flags.
Proposed change
Add these flags to the default
chromium-flags.conf:This would also benefit the Electron flag files (
electron-flags.conf, etc.) since Electron apps like Teams and Spotify have the same issue.Why it's not enabled by default
Chromium disables hardware acceleration on Linux by default due to driver compatibility concerns across the wide variety of GPU drivers. Since Omarchy targets a known setup (Arch + Intel/AMD), it should be safe to enable by default.
Verification
After adding the flags, hardware acceleration can be verified in Chromium at
chrome://gpu— look for "Video Decode: Hardware accelerated" and "Video Encode: Hardware accelerated".