[CRO-MUXON] Linux Setup

Cro-Muxon tiles real browser windows by telling Chromium exactly where to put them and how big to make them. On Linux, that only works under X11 — under native Wayland, window placement is a protocol-level restriction, not a Cro-Muxon bug: apps simply aren't allowed to know or set their own screen position, for isolation reasons. Most modern Ubuntu/GNOME installs default to Wayland, which is why splits and tiling can silently do nothing at all until you fix this. (On Google Chrome instead of Chromium? Everything below works the same way — just swap google-chrome-stable in for chromium.)

THE FIX: RUN CHROMIUM WITH --ozone-platform=x11

This forces Chromium to run through XWayland instead of native Wayland, which restores its ability to position and resize windows. It doesn't change anything else about how it looks or behaves. Two ways to launch it this way — pick whichever fits how you want to use it day to day.

Running the Snap build (Ubuntu's apt install chromium-browser default)? Option A below still works fine, but Snap's confinement doesn't reliably honor custom flags added through a .desktop file, so Option B may not stick — if it doesn't, Option A is the reliable fallback.

Option A — one command, every time

Quit every open Chromium window first (it keeps running in the background even after the last window closes, so check your system tray/app switcher too) — the flag only takes effect at startup, not on windows already open. Then, from a terminal:

chromium --ozone-platform=x11

Option B — a launcher you can search for

Typing a command every time gets old fast. This creates a second, ordinary-looking launcher — "Chromium (X11)" — that shows up in the same app search as everything else (GNOME's Activities overview, on Ubuntu), so you can launch it the normal way from now on.

1. Find Chromium's real binary path:

   which chromium

   (commonly /usr/bin/chromium, or /snap/bin/chromium if you're on the Snap build)
2. Create ~/.local/share/applications/chromium-x11.desktop with this content, using the path from step 1:

   [Desktop Entry]
   Name=Chromium (X11)
   Comment=Chromium via XWayland, for Cro-Muxon's window tiling
   Exec=/usr/bin/chromium --ozone-platform=x11 %U
   Terminal=false
   Type=Application
   Icon=chromium
   Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
   StartupWMClass=Chromium

3. Save the file. It should appear in your app search within a few seconds — if it doesn't, log out and back in, or run update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications.
4. From now on, launch Chromium through this "Chromium (X11)" entry instead of the regular icon whenever you want to use Cro-Muxon.

VERIFY IT WORKED

Open any page, press Alt+Shift+H to split it. If the window visibly resizes and tiles side-by-side with a new pane, you're on X11 and everything should work normally from here — splits, drags, the dashboard, zoom, all of it. If nothing happens, double-check every Chromium window and background process was actually closed before relaunching with the flag.

IF Alt+Shift+C DOESN'T OPEN THE DASHBOARD

Splits (Alt+Shift+V / Alt+Shift+H) working while the dashboard's own shortcut does nothing points at GNOME itself, not Cro-Muxon — under Wayland (even through XWayland), the desktop shell reserves global keyboard shortcuts before individual apps ever see them, unlike X11 where any app could grab a combo directly. If something on your system already claims Alt+Shift+C, Chromium silently leaves the extension's shortcut unassigned rather than showing a conflict.

Fix: open chrome://extensions/shortcuts and set "Toggle the dashboard" to whatever combo you like — that page lists every extension's shortcuts in one place, so it's also the fastest way to spot if something else already sits on the key you want.