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.
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).I don’t like that either. Thanks for that insight and thanks for sharing the link to change that!