I’m especially concerned about it being somehow broken, unwieldy, insecure or privacy-invasive.
Case in point; at times I have to rely on a Chromium-based browser if a website decides to misbehave on a Firefox-based browser. Out of the available options I gravitate towards Brave as it seems like the least bad out of the bunch.
Unfortunately, their RPM-package leaves a lot to be desired and has multiple times just been awful to deal with. So much so that I have been using another Chromium-based browser instead that’s available directly from my distro’s repos. But…, I would still switch to Brave in an instant if Brave was found in my distro’s repos. A quick search on repology.org reveals that an up-to-date Brave is packaged in the AUR (unsurprisingly), Manjaro and Homebrew. I don’t feel like changing distros for the sake of a single program, but adding Homebrew to my arsenal of universal package managers doesn’t sound that bad. But, not all universal package managers are created equal, therefore I was interested to know how Homebrew fares compared to the others and if it handles the packaging of the browser without blemishing the capabilities of the browser’s sandbox.
P.S. I expect people to recommend me Distrobox instead. Don’t worry, I have been a staunch user of Distrobox for quite a while now. I have also run Brave through an Arch-distrobox in the past. But due to some concerns I’ve had, I chose to discontinue this. Btw, its Flatpak package ain’t bad either. But unfortunately it’s not official, so I choose to not make use of it for that reason.
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Brave is worse than Chrome. Affiliate link auto injection, unauthorised selling is copyrighted data, their own unblockable ad network, etc. Use Firefox.
Their business-practices sure do leave a lot to desire, which actually does hurt their trustworthiness; arguably their most valuable asset as a privacy-first browser. Hmm…, good food for thought, thank you!
Use Firefox.
I mostly do already 😅, from OP: “at times I have to rely on a Chromium-based browser if a website decides to misbehave on a Firefox-based browser”.
You can try ungoogled chromium. That is what I use when librewolf won’t work.
Thank you for mentioning that! I had dismissed it due to alleged shortcomings of its security features. While the allegations are (still) there, I’ve never heard any rebuttal or anything else of that matter. Would you happen to know anything in this regard?
Sorry no. I just use it once a month or so for one website and I think it works with FF now.
Thanks anyways!
check Nix instead.
Nix is definitely cool and I already have it installed on my system. Unfortunately, even Nix has trouble with keeping Brave up-to-date at all times. It’s still on 1.59.120, while Brave has had three releases since. It took about 3 days after the release of version 1.59.120 for them to release it on their repos. As you can see, it leaves a lot to desire.
It’s a community maintained repo. The possibility of updating it yourself is possible. The master branch is updated to the 1.59.124, which came out a week ago. And was updated around the same time. 1.60.110 was just released 1 day ago. You can update it yourself. After all, it’s supposed to give you a great default state to fall back to, not keep you on the bleeding edge of releases.
Edir: how to do it yourself and contribute to the community. https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Update_a_package
The master branch is updated to the 1.59.124
Brain fart on my side, thanks for correcting me so respectfully 😊!
Hmm…, maintaining it myself is an interesting thought. Perhaps I should take a look at that, thanks a lot for your input. Much appreciated!
Minor version bumps should be mostly trivial: Change version and hash, package that into commit+PR (ckeck guidelines on that!) and that’s it most of the time.
The harder part is QA; ensuring it still works as expected. Therefore, even just testing update PRs as they come in would be a great help.
If the code change is trivial and a user of the package said it still works for them, a commiter coming along is likely convinced of the PR’s quality and just merges it.It’s super easy to contribute to Nixpkgs in a meaningful manner :)
Last time I checked, homebrew on Linux only included cli apps. GUI apps are only available on mac. So you couldn’t use it to install a browser anyway.
What does Brave give you what the other Chromium based browser doesn’t have? Maybe you can install add-ons instead?
What does Brave give you what the other Chromium based browser doesn’t have?
Brave is known to take privacy (and security) more seriously than its contenders. It’s therefore unsurprising to find it recommended by Privacy Guides. Some of its unique features related to privacy can be found here.
Maybe you can install add-ons instead?
Excellent extensions like uBlock Origin heavily rely on Manifest v2 in order to do their bidding. Unfortunately, Chromium intends to stop supporting it. Which will inevitably lead to many Chromium-based browsers to follow the lead and stop supporting it as well. At least Brave has confirmed multiple times to support Manifest v2 longer. Furthermore, I’m not aware of any extension that does an equally excellent job at spoofing your fingerprint randomly. Though, I’d love to be corrected on that.
Brave is known to take privacy (and security) more seriously than its contenders. It’s therefore unsurprising to find it recommended by Privacy Guides.
At least in the privacy community, Brave isn’t super popular. It feels more geared towards the “hyped crypto early adopters”. Brave inclusion in privacy guides has always been controversial.
Brave is ultimately an advertising company, they base their business model in ads. And everyone knows how bad that can turn.
Ungoogled Chromium on the other hand takes patches from brave and other Chromium based browsers, removing every bit of telemetry and giving you the cleanest experience you can get on Chromium, without relying on a shady company.
Brave is ultimately an advertising company, they base their business model in ads. And everyone knows how bad that can turn.
Seems more like FUD, but sure.
Ungoogled Chromium on the other hand takes patches from brave and other Chromium based browsers
In the past it was simply dismissed due to reasons mentioned here. I don’t have any qualms against Ungoogled Chromium, so I’m not opposed to using it if the stated reasons have been cleared since. But I’ve never got any confirmation on that.
Brave is known to take privacy (and security) more seriously than its contenders.
Nice, their marketing works. If you really cared about privacy you’d probably use something like Librewolf, which is not proprietary.
Excellent extensions like uBlock Origin heavily rely on Manifest v2 in order to do their bidding. Unfortunately, Chromium intends to stop supporting it.
It works without issues in Firefox and similar browsers like Librewolf.
Nice, their marketing works.
You can’t deny its merits. At best you can question their integrity based on bad business-practices in the past. Their CEO being “X” and doing “Y” does not inherently make the software bad.
If you really cared about privacy you’d probably use something like Librewolf, which is not proprietary.
From OP: “at times I have to rely on a Chromium-based browser if a website decides to misbehave on a Firefox-based browser”
You can’t deny its merits.
Yes, yes I can. It’s proprietary and doesn’t do anything better than Firefox or Librewolf. The latter even has an active community on Lemmy.
Their CEO being “X” and doing “Y” does not inherently make the software bad.
I didn’t even mention the CEO, you must have confused my reply. It’s the product being X and doing Y which I don’t like.
doesn’t do anything better than Firefox or Librewolf.
Besides the fact that some sites misbehave on Firefox(-based browsers), it does if you’re actually security sensitive; Chromium’s sandbox is simply superior to Firefox’.
I didn’t even mention the CEO, you must have confused my reply. It’s the product being X and doing Y which I don’t like.
It’s true that you didn’t mention anything regarding its CEO, but I assumed your comment might be related to it. It seems not to be the case; my bad for assuming and mentioning it and thank you for clearing yourself from that ‘allegation’!
Would it be fair to assume that your primary gripe with Brave is its (at best) controversial stance regarding the ‘open’ source nature of their product?
Yes, and the business practices of the company making it which broke my trust to the point of me assuming they wouldn’t be above breaking the law in compiling spyware or other malware into their closed source product for profit.
Thanks for clarifying!
they wouldn’t be above breaking the law in compiling spyware or other malware into their closed source product for profit.
I might misremember this, but wasn’t it only something like a key (or something similar) that they held to themselves? And if so, is it even sensible that spyware can be put in their ‘key’?
Not sure why you would want to.
Linux package managers are state of the art.
Not sure why you would want to.
😅, it’s explained in OP.
Linux package managers are state of the art.
I wonder if Nix-users would agree 🤔.
what is a package manager
I feel a bit lazy at the moment, but Brodie does IMO an excellent job at explaining what a package manager is within the context of Linux. I’d recommend you to watch that instead over here; it’s already set to play at the correct time*.
Utilities that manage packages on your system.
Graphical ones include Pamac and Synaptic.
The command-line ones are more known: apt (debian), pacman (arch), rpm (fedora), and yum (suse)
I’ve been using Homebrew on Linux for several years and never had an issue. As others have said, it will not be able to provide GUI applications (in most cases) as on macOS, but it is a great way to get system and indie software alike
My only experience with homebrew is on macOS and I’ve switched to MacPorts there. Homebrew did some weird permissions things I didn’t care for (chowned all of /usr/local to $USER, if I’m remembering right). It worked fine on a single user system, but seemed like a bad philosophy to me. This was years ago and I don’t know how it behaves on Linux.
I also prefer Firefox, but when I need a Chromium alternative for testing, I opt for the flatpak (or the snap) version personally.
Based on what I saw on macOS I wouldn’t touch Homebrew with a 10 feet pole. We have proper packaging systems in the Linux world. The Chromium snap is supported by Canonical so that’s a great candidate for anything that comes with snap or can use snap. If I couldn’t use snap, I’d use the Chromium flatpak from Flathub.
I use homebrew on linux, you’re not going to get GUI apps that way though, the linux binaries are almost exclusively cli apps and libraries, etc.
I use a few packages from Homebrew and don’t have any problems with it. By default it installs itself into
/home/homebrewor something which I didn’t like so I put it into~/Applications/Homebrewinstead using these steps. It warns that you may be forced to compile software if you do it this way but I’m down to clown so whatever.The biggest problem I have with it is that you’ll need to keep it updated alongside your regular packages, which I do by aliasing a simple upgrade command that runs all my package manager upgrades.
I would also recommend
ungoogled-chromiumas an alternative to Brave, which does have its own official Flatpak (not marked as such but it’s linked to in theungoogled-chromiumproject github).By default it installs itself into
/home/homebrewor somethingI don’t like that either. Thanks for that insight and thanks for sharing the link to change that!
I tried Homebrew once in a VM and didn’t like it, I felt it was too invasive.
Why does it create another user and put files under
/home/linuxbrew/? Answer:The script installs Homebrew to its default, supported, best prefix (/opt/homebrew for Apple Silicon, /usr/local for macOS Intel and /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew for Linux) so that you don’t need sudo after Homebrew’s initial installation when you brew install.
Where’s the logic in that? Why not just install to the user’s home directory so that you don’t even need root access in the first place?
Why is
sudohard-coded? Answer: it’s to prevent people from usingdoasand othersudoalternatives.Why is installing from the tarball unsupported and so frowned upon? FFS isn’t this just supposed to be a package manager? Why is everything so complicated and opinionated when compared to pip, cargo, Flatpak, etc? Compare this mess to Golang’s install and uninstall process where you literally just need to
tar -xzfa file orrm -rfa directory.Wow, great comment! Much appreciated!
Where’s the logic in that? Why not just install to the user’s home directory so that you don’t even need root access in the first place?
Excellent remark! Wow, that by itself already wrote it off for me.
Why is
sudohard-coded? Answer: it’s to prevent people from usingdoasand othersudoalternatives.Another home-run! Especially as I’ve been a staunch user of
doasfor quite a while now and wouldn’t like to give up on that. Thank you so much for informing me on this!Your third point is also interesting to ponder upon, though it wasn’t as impactful to me personally as the previous two were.
I would like to thank you once again for your astoundingly awesome insights on this matter! This comment has definitely contributed the most in me letting go of the thought of using Homebrew entirely (while some others already informed me that GUI-apps (mostly) can’t be installed from Homebrew to function on Linux anyways).
Distrobox… or simply Flatpak?
Read the part after P.S 😅.
Brave homophobic though
It is the best Chromium based browser, in a sense, unfortunately…
Brave homophobic though
Its CEO; yes.
It is the best Chromium based browser, in a sense, unfortunately…
Agreed.
Check thorium
Once x86 macOS became stable around snow leopard I switched from Linux to macOS full time on my mobile machines. For years home brew was a shining light to get a decent tool chain installed to be able to do development. But somewhere around the time they changed to naming macOS releases after places in California, both home brew and macOS started changing in ways that made it harder to maintain a stable development environment. Why and when did it start deciding to upgrade every package I have installed when I try to install a new package? It regularly broke both mine and our developers’ machines and I finally had enough of both. Stay away from home brew if you want your working development environment to continue working 6 months later. It WILL break when you need it most and cost you hours if not days of work to fix. I’ve never ran home brew on Linux but it’s honestly not anything I would ever consider even when it worked well.
I can highly recommend using Nix on macOS! We never randomly update your apps (wtf?)
I would love to consume Brave as a nixpkgs, unfortunately it’s mostly not up to date; which I simply can’t accept.
I haven’t used brave but I can see that we’re on the release before the one yesterday. I’d expect a PR in the coming days.
This comment of mine begs to differ 😜 . Though, I can see where you’re coming from.
