Are there any PPAs that maintain deb's of chromium-browser with the same file system layout as before?

1 points · submitted Mar 2025 by u/Ark42

Finding PPAs with Chromiun debs is already hard, and most seem abandoned, but the few I did find seem to have totally different dependencies and internal file system structures than the chromium-browser, chromium-browser-l10n, and chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra packages we currently use. We're actually still using the Ubuntu 18.04 v112 files on hundreds of thousands of Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, and soon 24.04 systems, but this upgrade path has obviously reached its end, and we're looking for paths forward that do not involve snap (our ecosystem will not work with that). Unfortunately, every PPA I've found totally changes the package names (such as just chromium instead of chromium-browser) or the places it installs the binary to on the system, that more or less give me the same amount of headaches as just looking at the snap versions. Anybody have any good recommendations for PPAs?

asking why not use snap is off topic, so please refrain from posting in this thread if you can't answer the question being asked.

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jbicha 4 points · Mar 2025

Why can't you use the Snap?

Or why can't you use the Flathub version?

Or why can't you use Google Chrome, which is distributed as a .deb ?

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[deleted] 2 points · Mar 2025

Sounds like it's time to start doing the work yourself, honestly.

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Ark42 [OP] 1 points · Mar 2025

If I had the knowledge and time, I'm sure I would be doing that already. But I don't, which is why I'm asking here.

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Takeoded 0 points · Apr 2026

The best snap-free alternative I've found is: ``` curl -fsSL https://dl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub \ | sudo gpg --dearmor --yes -o /etc/apt/keyrings/google-chrome.gpg

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main"

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/google-chrome /usr/bin/chromium-browser ```

it will install a Chromium fork called Chrome, and make an invokable alias called chromium-browser. The Chrome fork is maintained by a company called Google, which is the main sponsor of the Chromium project, with the majority of Chromium developers also being Google employees.

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