Installing Google Chrome on Fedora Silverblue

Hi,

I just installed Google Chrome in Fedora Silverblue 29 and it works very well.

Kudos to Alex Larsson and the rpm-ostree team to make it possible!

Jorge

Steps to install Google Chrome on Fedora Silverblue 29:

  1. Update your installation: rpm-ostree update

  2. Reboot

  3. Download Google Chrome “64 bit .rpm (For Fedora/openSUSE)” from the official site

  4. rpm-ostree install google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm

  5. Reboot

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Please note that Google Chrome is proprietary software, and all users
considering the installation should consider whether or not they wish to pull
proprietary software into a system consisting otherwise of Free Software
(other than firmware).

Note: these instructions also worked for installing Brave, so I am assuming they may work for other Chromium based browsers that provide RPMs.

Great work rpm-ostree team!

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This is the great thing about the SilverBlue workstation OS. You have a lot of choice about what software to install and how. You can install RPMs as overlay packages from third party repos or downloads, Flatpaks from multiple online repositories/stores (e.g. Flathub), and premade containerized applications from Dockerhub or other registries. You can also download and build from source easily using the toolbox. All these options are great and run on a totally free open source base. And with the Fedora IoT rpm-ostree distro, it is very easy for companies and projects to release customized devices running both open source and proprietary software together. This is totally awesome!

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When I install Chrome RPM this way, it is not auto-updating. Is there any solution for this?

I’m using regular Fedora Workstation now but what I used to do is to reinstall Chrome manually from time to time, but of course it is not the optimal solution…

Missatge de Ellen via Fedora Discussion <fedoraproject@discoursemail.com> del dia dc., 26 d’ag. 2020 a les 15:00:

Check out this thread: Software updates not getting installed

Summary: when you install chrome via the local .rpm file, it adds the Google RPM repository, but doesn’t use it for updates. So, if you uninstall the local .rpm using rpm-ostree, and then install chrome using the now installed Google RPM repository, you’ll see it installed as a layered package rather than a local package. The layered package gets updates.

1 Like

Hello @enck,
Welcome to the community! Thanks for posting this clarification, others will find it useful.