Chrome / Chromium doesn’t launch with GPU-related exit_code 134 on Linux

In certain circumstances Google Chrome or Chromium can fail to launch on Linux distros that use Wayland, like Ubuntu.

In this situation, when trying to launch the browser through the normal desktop shortcuts nothing appears to happen. When launching google-chrome-stable or chromium from a Terminal window, it becomes apparent that Chrome is crashing with a stack smashing exception related to the GPU.

If you’re running a Linux distribution that uses Wayland, this might be stopping Chrome/Chromium from launching properly. You can pass a terminal argument to the app to tell it to talk directly to Wayland, which will solve the problem in some cases.

After successful testing in the Terminal, you can choose to modify the .desktop file for Chrome or Chromium in /usr/share/applications. This is where app launchers, docks and menus look for installed programs.