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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

In order for the linux compat to be generally useful, we really need to get electron apps working, which means getting chrome itself working.

There are some commercial software packages that run which are useful in more limited scopes. For example, I run a linux PVR server (SageTV), and Intel's Vtune GUI. But getting chrome & electron working would enable tons of commercial linux apps.

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Running Linux Chrome in a FreeBSD Linux jail already works [1].

But, Chrome is already ported to FreeBSD [2]. Not sure why you'd need Linux Chrome specifically. In fact, there's already a port of Electron [3].

[1] https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/linuxulator-how-to-run-go...

[2] https://www.freshports.org/www/chromium

[3] https://www.freshports.org/devel/electron5/

Its marked as broken in the LinuxApps page linked to from the article (https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxApps). And its been broken every time I've tried it on -current.

You need Linux electron working in order to be able to run things like Slack's Linux desktop app, and other electron apps which are compiled for Linux.

And you need the Linux binary chrome from Google in order for DRM to work.

Worth to make note of the fact that the forum post that was linked to by the parent comment to yours, about being able to run Linux Chrome on FreeBSD, was actually posted today. So it might be promising? But at the same time, the post also states that it relies on a few workarounds that are likely to interfere with other things on the system. So probably one should not get their hopes up too high just yet either.

Have you tried it with --no-sandbox --no-zygote --test-type yet? I haven't, yet. Admittedly, I'd much rather run Chrome in its sandbox, but if this is a good starting point, great.

It does not look good for the Electron port [1].

These ports will be removed soon due to their Python 2 dependency, and the available versions are not supported anymore [2].

[1] https://www.freshports.org/search.php?query=electron&search=...

[2] https://www.electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/support

Ah, I think the key part from [1] is: "--no-sandbox --no-zygote", and possibly "--test-type". Cool, thanks.

You can NOT use Netflix/Spotify/... on Chrome on FreeBSD.

You CAN use Netflix/Spotify/... on Chrome under Ubuntu Linux Jail on FreeBSD.

Reason: Widevine DRM

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