Use chromium instead of a manual chrome download

[pat-s]

Advantages:

• chromium is available on both amd64 and arm64 for most distros (chrome isn't and e.g. fails on Ubuntu)
• Less pre_install and post_install due to direct package manager call
• More lightweight and secure (as chromium doesn't bundle all the Google stuff)

No arch-agnostic solution for the old centos but that shouldn't matter much in practice.

FYI: Currently, {chromote} errors when being installed via pak on any arm64 Linux distribution as the download has amd64 hardcoded.

[pat-s]

I think we're finally good here.

[glin]

Sounds good to me, and I assume this works fine for Chromote? cc @schloerke just to double check.

I think we actually had chromium before and then replaced it with Chrome at some point. The original issue was #86, so I wonder if chromium still has the snap issue.

[glin]

Is Ubuntu 24.04 supported?

[pat-s]

Yes. Good catch, I lost it in the refactoring as starting with 24.04, the key is chromium instead of chromium-browser. Added it.

[pat-s]

Sounds good to me, and I assume this works fine for Chromote?

That was the initial motivation, to get all OS & their archs working for {chromote}.

Not sure if #86 is still valid/important as meanwhile one can install it through apt using chromium-browser.

[schloerke]

Sounds good to me, and I assume this works fine for Chromote? cc @schloerke just to double check.

I looks ok to me. I have not tested it. But {chromote} should pick up a chrome devtools protocol compatible browser by default.

Thank you for the updates!

[glin]

I just tested apt install chromium-browser in Ubuntu 22/24 and it does still seem to be a stub for the snap package:

docker run -it --rm ubuntu:jammy

apt update -qq && apt install -y chromium-browser

$ chromium-browser

Command '/usr/bin/chromium-browser' requires the chromium snap to be installed.
Please install it with:

snap install chromium

$ snap install chromium
error: cannot communicate with server: Post "http://localhost/v2/snaps/chromium": dial unix /run/snapd.socket: connect: no such file or directory

So I think we still do have the same issue from #86 where this isn't going to work well for containers.

Is there an alternative direct binary download for chromium we could use instead? Just from a quick search, https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium/ lists some script for Linux, but I haven't tested it and it's 8 years old 🤔

[pat-s]

Ah, now I see what #86 was about.

I've found a ppa for jammy/noble: ppa:xtradeb/apps. Looks like a sophisticated project that won't go unmaintained in the near future: https://xtradeb.net/apps/chromium/.

However, it is missing support for focal.
As I couldn't find a solution for it, I kept it at the old static amd64 download. Given that focal is EOL soon anyhow, this might be okayish. The other changes are still an improvement and allow having dynamic amd64/arm64 support.

NB: please squash-merge to avoid including all the non-meaningful dummy commits in which I fixed the schema.

[glin]

Aw, unfortunate that google doesn't provide any nice way of apt installing chromium. We usually avoid 3rd-party PPAs if at all possible, but this one looks fine and doesn't seem like it'll conflict with the default system libraries. Looks good.