For years, it was one of the more glaring omissions in Google’s browser strategy. Chrome, the world’s dominant web browser by a commanding margin, simply did not run natively on ARM-based Linux machines. Not on the Raspberry Pi. Not on Ampere-powered cloud servers. Not on the growing fleet of ARM laptops running Linux distributions. Users who wanted Chrome on these devices had to settle for Chromium — the open-source project that underpins Chrome but lacks proprietary features like sync, official update channels, and certain media codecs.
That’s finally over.
Google has released a native ARM64 build of Chrome for Linux, a move reported by Slashdot and confirmed through Google’s own Chrome release channels. The browser is now available as a .deb package for Debian-based distributions and as an .rpm package for Fedora and related systems. It arrives not as a beta or a developer preview but as a stable release, slotting into Chrome version 135 and beyond.
The timing tells a story about where computing is headed.
ARM processors have been steadily infiltrating every layer of the computing stack. Apple’s M-series chips proved that ARM could compete with — and often surpass — x86 silicon in laptops and desktops. Amazon Web Services has been aggressively pushing its Graviton processors for cloud workloads, and Ampere Computing has carved out a growing niche in data centers. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips are arriving in Windows PCs. And at the lower end of the market, devices like the Raspberry Pi 5 have matured into surprisingly capable general-purpose computers. Linux runs on all of them.
Google’s decision to ship a native ARM64 Chrome for Linux isn’t charity. It’s pragmatism. The company needs Chrome everywhere — on every platform, every architecture, every device that might funnel users through Google Search, Google accounts, and Google’s advertising infrastructure. Leaving ARM64 Linux without an official Chrome build meant ceding that ground to Firefox, Chromium community builds, and other browsers that had long since added native ARM support.
The gap was becoming embarrassing. As Slashdot commenters noted, Microsoft Edge — itself built on Chromium — had already shipped ARM64 Linux builds. So had Vivaldi and Brave. Google, the company that actually maintains the Chromium project, was somehow behind its own downstream forks in supporting the architecture. That irony wasn’t lost on the developer community.
The technical work required to produce an ARM64 Linux build of Chrome isn’t trivial, but it’s also not the kind of moon-shot engineering that would explain a multi-year delay. Chrome already ran on ARM64 for Android and ChromeOS. The Chromium open-source project already compiled for ARM64 Linux. What Google needed to add were the proprietary components — the Google-branded sync services, Widevine DRM for streaming video, automatic updates through Google’s infrastructure, and the various integrations that differentiate Chrome from raw Chromium. Packaging and QA for a new platform target also require sustained commitment from a release engineering team, and Google apparently decided the user base had finally reached a threshold that justified the investment.
That threshold has been rising fast. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has sold tens of millions of units, and the Pi 5, with its quad-core Cortex-A76 processor and up to 8 GB of RAM, is powerful enough to serve as a daily-driver desktop for lightweight tasks. Educational institutions, hobbyists, and embedded developers around the world use these devices with Linux desktop environments. Many of them want Chrome — not Chromium, but Chrome, with all its proprietary conveniences.
Then there’s the server side. Developers building and testing web applications on ARM64 cloud instances often want a full Chrome installation for automated testing with tools like Puppeteer or Selenium. Running Chrome in headless mode on an ARM64 server was previously a hassle that involved either emulation layers or substituting Chromium and hoping the behavioral differences didn’t matter. A native ARM64 Chrome eliminates that friction.
And the corporate desktop market is shifting too. Companies evaluating ARM-based workstations — particularly those drawn by the power efficiency advantages — need their standard enterprise browser to work without workarounds. Chrome’s dominance in enterprise environments, where it often serves as the default browser for accessing SaaS applications, makes native ARM support a practical requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
The release also matters for the broader Linux desktop movement, which has been experiencing something of a quiet renaissance. Steam Deck popularized Linux gaming. Framework Laptop and System76 sell hardware designed for Linux. And the growing dissatisfaction with Windows 11’s hardware requirements and telemetry practices has pushed a measurable number of users toward Linux distributions. For these users, browser choice is one of the first practical decisions they face, and the absence of official Chrome builds for ARM64 was a real limitation for anyone running non-x86 hardware.
Google hasn’t made a major public announcement about the ARM64 Linux release — no blog post with glossy screenshots, no keynote mention. The builds simply appeared in the stable channel, discoverable through Google’s download page and package repositories. This low-key approach is consistent with how Google has handled other platform expansions for Chrome. The company tends to let the availability speak for itself, knowing that tech publications and community forums will spread the word.
But the quiet rollout shouldn’t obscure the significance. Chrome’s arrival on ARM64 Linux closes one of the last major gaps in the browser’s platform coverage. It means that ARM64 Linux is now a first-class citizen in Google’s browser strategy, entitled to the same stable releases, security patches, and feature updates as x86 Linux, macOS, and Windows.
There are still questions. Will Google maintain the ARM64 Linux builds with the same cadence and priority as other platforms? Will performance be on par with x86 builds, or will there be rough edges in areas like GPU acceleration and video decoding that take additional release cycles to polish? The answers will emerge over the coming months as the developer and enthusiast community puts the builds through real-world use.
For now, the practical upshot is simple: if you’re running Linux on an ARM64 machine — whether it’s a Raspberry Pi, an Ampere cloud instance, a Snapdragon-powered laptop, or an Apple Silicon Mac running Linux in a virtual machine — you can install the real, official Google Chrome. No workarounds. No substitutes.
It took longer than it should have. But it’s here.
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