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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

It would be great if Debian could make the Chromium in their repos a de-googled version and keep it up to date.

I have no idea how the Debian project is financed. So I don't know if it is possible for them to assign resources to it.

But Debian has a strong history of being trustworthy. So a userfriendly browser maintained by them would be nice.

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Debian gets sponsored by various ways but the money isn't used directly for developers nor their time. It is volunteer based project and money is usually used for hardware, sprints, conferences, outreachy etc.

That said Debian does take it seriously when it comes to privacy and security so you can always report bugs on such. Do note that Debian's Chromium builds have always disabled the infamous "mic always on" option which Chromium has (or had, didn't check) by default.

Btw, Debian now moved to gitlab hosting (their own instance salsa.debian.org) so it should be much easier to contribute to Debian now. :)

P.S. while Debian Developer myself, I stay away a lot from browser and especially Chromium, and I always suggest Firefox (it has really got better last year or so).

    it should be much easier to contribute to Debian now

But aren't they constantly getting new versions of Chromium from Google? I think going into the Debian Repo of Chromium and changing it would not be a viable path, right? You either have to convince Google to accept your changes too (Good luck with them accepting the de-googling haha) or you would have to consider a life of constantly de-googling new versions of Chromium.

Debian maintains its set of patches often (quite easy to handle with quilt in debian/patches). We get upstream source from upstream of course and use our patches until they get accepted (we don't force upstream to do so) when we of course remove obsolete ones.

Debian can't even get proper graphics driver support.

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