Chromium is an open source browser maintained by Google. Along with the Chromium browser itself, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and a slew of other notable web browsers are all based on the Chromium source code. It’s safe to say that Chromium plays a huge role in the way that many users view the web today.
Despite Chromium’s influence, it’s far more common to see Mozilla Firefox as the default web browser on Linux systems. Chromium is still the default browser on some systems and is almost always able to be installed directly from a distro’s package manager. Contrast this to a browser like Google Chrome, whose closed source precludes it from being as easily installed on Linux.
While Chromium is a fully functional browser on its own, it’s missing support for propriety codecs like H.264 and AAC. At the cost of minor inconveniences like this, you’ll be getting a open source, Chrome-like browser. We dive more into this topic in our Firefox vs. Chrome/Chromium guide.
In this guide, we’ll see how to install Chromium on all major Linux distributions.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to install Chromium on Debian, Red Hat, and Arch Linux based systems
Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
---|---|
System | Any Linux distro |
Software | Chromium |
Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
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 |
Install Chromium on Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint
Open a terminal and use the following commands to install Chromium on Debian based Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Debian, Kali, and Linux Mint.
$ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install chromium-browser
If you’d prefer to install the snap package instead, you can use the following command on Ubuntu or any other distro that has snap enabled.
$ sudo snap install chromium
To keep Chromium up to date on your system, simply use the same commands as above to update it.
$ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install chromium-browser
If you decide that you’d like to remove Chromium from your system in the future, use the following command to uninstall the web browser.
$ sudo apt purge chromium-browser
Install Chromium on Red Hat, CentOS, and Fedora
Open a terminal and use the following commands to install Chromium on Red Hat based Linux distributions, such as CentOS, Red Hat, and Fedora.
$ sudo dnf update $ sudo dnf install epel-release $ sudo dnf install chromium
To keep Chromium up to date on your system, simply use the same commands as above to update it.
$ sudo dnf update $ sudo dnf install chromium
If you decide that you’d like to remove Chromium from your system in the future, use the following command to uninstall the web browser.
$ sudo dnf remove chromium
Install Chromium on Arch Linux and Manjaro
Open a terminal and use the following commands to install Chromium on Arch Linux, Manjaro, and other Arch based distros.
$ sudo pacman -Syu $ sudo pacman -S chromium
To keep Chromium up to date on your system, simply use the same commands as above to update it.
$ sudo pacman -Syu $ sudo pacman -S chromium
If you decide that you’d like to remove Chromium from your system in the future, use the following command to uninstall the web browser.
$ sudo pacman -R chromium
Conclusion
In this guide, we saw how to install one of the world’s most influential open source browsers, Chromium, on an assortment of popular Linux distributions. It proves quite easy to install, as nearly all Linux distros include it in their default package repositories.