How to Disable ChromeOS Window Animation

[Leon]

Morning,

Lets face facts, as nice as ChromeOS might be - the animations is a big fail from Google - this half-wit implementation is utterly slow and when you have alot of tabs and android apps open - extremely lagging.

So.. lets kill it fire.. sortof anyway - ironicly - Google is here for the saving.

Orginal link: https://appuals.com/disable-chromeos-window-animation/

First of all - You need to be in dev mode (face facts, doing anything cool with your chromebook requires that) - and before you can get into that - you will properly need to reset your device - meaning.. DO BACKUP.

Anyway, once you are in dev mode, its fairly easy.

1. Popup a shell: CTRL+ALT+T
2. Type: shell (to open a shell)
3. Type: sudo su (to be come root)

Now, we need to modify a file call chrome_dev.conf which is located in ETC, but changing that might cause it to be overwritten on a firmware update.. so lets make a copy of it and do a mount.

Type this:
cp /etc/chrome_dev.conf /usr/local

mount --bind /usr/local/chrome_dev.conf /etc/chrome_dev.conf
echo '--wm-window-animations-disabled' >> /etc/chrome_dev.conf
restart ui
exit

This should effectively kill most animations and make your chromeos feel alot faster.

//Leon
 

[Leon]

Followup:
Now, as you by this point have noticed is that ChromeOS will disable the mount after a shutdown - now, i must warn you before going on that this might leave your system more vulnerable - but if you are used to tinkering around and want full control.

The solution can be found at: https://sites.google.com/site/cr48ite/getting-technical/remove-rootfs-verification-make-read-write

Basically, what we want todo is to disable the write protect on the root file system.

 

Go into shell and run the following:

sudo su

cd /usr/share/vboot/bin/

./make_dev_ssd.sh --remove_rootfs_verification --partitions 4

reboot

Upon reboot go back into shell
 

sudo su -

mount -o remount,rw /

Right, so now the write protection is disabled on the root file system and its time to have some fun.

Our goal here is to our custom chrome_dev.conf loaded ... there is some different ways we can go around this.

1. We can edit /etc/chrome_dev.conf directly... but the chances are that whatever we do will get overwritten after a firmware update.. 

2. We could try and bind mount it via /etc/fstab but chromeos have its own userland - so that wont load during boot.. 

3. We could do a init script that would load during boot.

Allright, lets test some stuff.

Option 1) - Making changes directly in /etc/chrome_dev.conf offcourse works so no point in looking at that

Option 2) - adding a bind mount to /etc/fstab

run:

echo '/usr/local/chrome_dev.conf /etc/chrome_dev.conf none defaults,bind 0 0 ' >> /etc/fstab

(you can verify it by running: cat /etc/fstab)

Now.. do a reboot.... do a "cat /etc/chrome_dev.conf" and compare it to "cat /etc/chrome_dev.conf" ... what did we learn here ?

.. that chrome os does not load /etc/fstab on boot... £$@!!. .. more info here: 

 

To add a bit of fuel to fire - i can tell you straith of that editing "/usr/share/baselayout/fstab" wont do anything either.. so option 3 is off the table..well. kinda.. it does allow you to manually run "mount /etc/chrome_dev.conf" ... so atleast /etc/fstab is infact used by Linux itself.. just not loaded during boot.

I will get back to option (3) in the next comment...