Brave is a free and open source web browser focused on providing a privacy-oriented setup by default. It is released under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0, and it is based on chromium, which is also the open source foundation upon Google Chrome is built. Brave comes with useful built-in features such an ad-blocker, a private search engine, an integrated VPN, and Tor support.
In this tutorial we learn how to install Brave on the most used Linux distributions, using native packages or as a flatpak.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to install Brave on Debian-based distributions
- How to install Brave on Fedora-based distributions
- How to install Brave as a flatpak
| Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
|---|---|
| System | Debian or Fedora-based distributions |
| Software | None |
| Other | Administrative privileges |
| Conventions | # – requires given linux-commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux-commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Installing Brave on Debian-based distributions
Brave provides official repositories for both Debian and Fedora-based distributions. To add the Brave repository on a Debian system, all we have to do is to write its definition in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d directory. We just need to run the following command:
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg] https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/ stable main"| sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list
See the “signed-by” notation between square brackets in the repository definition? That is the path of the GPG key used to sign the repository packages. To install it on our system, we can simply use Curl:
$ sudo curl -Lo /usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg
Finally, we can synchronize the repositories and install the “brave-browser” package:
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y brave-browser
Installing Brave on Fedora and Fedora-based distributions
To install Brave on Fedora and Fedora-based distributions, we first need to add the official RPM repository to our favorite distribution software sources. We can do it by using dnf:
$ sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://brave-browser-rpm-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser.repo
The command will download the file into the
/etc/yum.repos.d directory. Now, just as we did for Debian-based systems, we need to add the Brave GPG key used to sign the packages to the “rpm” package manager keyring:
$ sudo rpm --import https://brave-browser-rpm-release.s3.brave.com/brave-core.asc
At this point, we can simply install Brave as we would install any other package:
$ sudo dnf install brave-browser
Installing Brave as a flatpak
Using flatpaks we can install Brave, together with its dependencies, in a sandboxed environment. To use this distribution-independent installation method, as a first thing, we need to install the flatpak utility itself. On Fedora, and other distributions of the Red Hat family, we can run:
$ sudo dnf install flatpak
On Debian and Debian-based distributions, instead:
$ sudo apt install flatpak
We can now add the Flathub repository as a software source. We can do this system-wide, so that it is usable by all users, or just for ourselves. The former is the obvious solution if all users need to access the browser; the latter has the advantage of not requiring elevated privileges, and can be handy if we are the only user on the system, or we lack said privileges. In this case, we will perform a system-wide installation (performing a user-level installation is just a matter of launching the commands below without “sudo”, and with the
--user option).
To add the Flathub repository, we run:
$ sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Once the repository is available, we can install Brave by running:
$ sudo flatpak install -y flathub com.brave.Browser
Once installed, the Brave desktop launcher may not be immediately visible in the applications menu launcher. To update it, we can run:
$ xdg-desktop-menu force-update
Conclusions
In this tutorial we learned how to install the Brave browser on Linux. We saw how to add the browser official repositories to Fedora and Debian-based distributions and how to perform a distribution-independent installation using the flatpak technology. To know more about the Brave, you can visit the browser official website or take a look at the project repository on Github.