Chromium Can Now Build Itself as a Flatpak, but Google Says Official Support Isn’t Promised

Google browser engineer Tom Anderson merged experimental Flatpak packaging into Chromium’s Linux installer code on Tuesday. With it, the browser’s own build system can produce a Flatpak in place of a .deb or .rpm. The commit message is careful about what this means.

“Add experimental Flatpak packaging in chrome/installer/linux to facilitate testing restricted sandboxing configurations and extending existing XDG portal support. This is not a commitment to officially support Flatpak packages,” Anderson wrote in the commit, which Lei Zhang reviewed.

What the patch does

The code sits in a new chrome/installer/linux/flatpak directory, which holds packaging scripts plus templates for metadata, AppStream metainfo and a launcher. A new GN build argument, enable_flatpak, turns it on and is off by default. When the flag is set, the build leaves out things Flatpak handles itself, such as system desktop files, /usr/bin symlinks, GNOME default-app entries, manpages and AppArmor profiles. App IDs are mapped to org.chromium.Chromium for Chromium and com.google.Chrome for Chrome. Non-official builds also disable the setuid sandbox and zlib compression.

Phoronix said the change could make Chrome easier to install on distributions that aren’t RPM- or Debian-based. Flathub already has Chromium and Chrome Flatpaks, but OMG! Ubuntu notes that community volunteers maintain them independently of Google. The site doubts Google would put Chrome on Flathub even if it ships official Flatpaks, because the company prefers to control its own update path, the same reason Chrome isn’t in the Snap Store.

The portal work began earlier. In December, Chromium merged printing through the XDG print portal (PrintDialogLinuxPortal, behind the kLinuxXdgPrintPortal feature) for Chrome 145. That fixed printing from Flatpak and Snap sandboxes and gave Linux users a more native print dialog.

So far all of this is limited to a build flag. Whether Google ever publishes Flatpak builds will depend on how the restricted-sandbox testing goes.