How to permanently fix color emoji (Use Noto Color Emoji in Chrome, Brave Browser, etc) (Ubuntu 20.04)
Sometimes color emoji display correctly, and sometimes they display as black and white line art. Sometimes, reinstalling Noto Color Emoji resolves the issue TEMPORARILY. Over time, an update or reboot or something causes it to revert to black and white. Some people report success by changing fontconfig configuration files, but it's never worked for me.
Every solution I could find either didn't work, or the behavior reverted over time. Finally, I came up with my own. It's worked through reboots and patches for a month, so I wanted to share.
Just run the following command to create a symlink to the noto color emoji files in the current user's ~/.fonts directory.
Don't use sudo: