Linux Mint Now Packaging Their Own Chromium, Developing New IPTV Player

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Mint Now Packaging Their Own Chromium, Developing New IPTV Player

With this month's Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux Mint development news there are two items worth calling attention to...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Mint-Chromium-Hypnotix

[CochainComplex]

So for my understanding It is the vanilla chromium just distributed by them to get always the most recent stable. no further (privacy) modifications?

[Awesomeness]

No word on contributing their Chromium efforts to Debian...

[waitman]

I'm guessing it's to get away from the (evil?) thing that is snap.

[scratchi]

I'm surprised it took them so long to roll their own chromium. I've been doing it since ubuntu 19.10 released and they started pushing chromium via snaps. I set up a pipeline that compiles chromium, generates a .deb and this runs weekly so I always have the newest version. Just for fun i use the unstable branch which is on chromium 88 now

You can try it on www.anonvdi.ca, use the ubuntu web and/or media image.

[CochainComplex]

I'm guessing it's to get away from the (evil?) thing that is snap.

Interessting it seems to be the second (?) ubuntu derivate doing it PopOS now Mint. Its good to see that maintainers sense the issues with snaps.

[archkde]

No word on contributing their Chromium efforts to Debian...

Yeah, that would really be the best for both sides.

[xAlt7x]

If anyone wonder their package is built without VAAPI support.
I just don't get it why Ubutnu/Debian maintainers still ignore it while SUSE and Fedora people had it for a while. With version 86 upstream even whitelisted it so you don't even need special patch. All you need is recent libva (version 2.2.0+ which ships with both Ubuntu 20.04 and Debian 10) and few lines inside "control" and "rules" files inside "debian" folder.

[Danny3]

I ditched Linux Mint when they stopped offering a KDE Plasma version so I don't care what they do, but I'm curios...
Why don't they build a version of Ungoogled-Chromium instead of the plain Chromium which is know to still have a lot of spyware from Google ?
Don't the Linux Mint developers care about their users' privacy ?

[andre30correia]

snap is working really well. netflix working whatsapp, super fast, this effort is useless but ok, their choice