Distill mode in Chromium is firefox's "reader view" equivalent. For some reason, this feature has not still "graduated" to be enabled by default, but it is just a matter of setting a flag.
To find out the way to set a flag, I popped open /usr/bin/chromium-browser file and quickly noticed following comment in the script:
# default CHROMIUM_FLAGS (from /etc/$APPNAME/default)
So I opened that file in my favorite text editor code /etc/chromium-browser/default :
Original file contents:
# Default settings for chromium-browser. This file is sourced by /bin/sh from
# /usr/bin/chromium-browser
# Options to pass to chromium-browser
CHROMIUM_FLAGS=""
Modified file contents:
# Default settings for chromium-browser. This file is sourced by /bin/sh from
# /usr/bin/chromium-browser
# Options to pass to chromium-browser
CHROMIUM_FLAGS="--enable-dom-distiller"
Save and close. Restart your browser, and voila!
Now you will see "Distill Page" option in the menu.