After Chrome and Firefox, Brave is one of the most widely used web browsers on Linux. Brave is open source, and it is developed from the Chromium project, hence it can be really useful for people migrating from the Chrome browser into a comparatively safe and private environment.
The most advertised feature of this browser is the built-in ad blocker, which also blocks the privacy-invading cross-site trackers and cookies. And thus it protects you without you even knowing about it.
But what about your favorite content creator?
Ads are the only way through which content creators (on YouTube, or blogs) earn their living. Their income source is simply lost if you disable the ads everywhere. However, Brave has a workaround for this. You can whitelist the website and YouTube channels of your favorite content creators. And there’s another way too.
Brave pays you in BAT (Brave’s cryptocurrency) when you choose to watch ads, and you can set the Browser to automatically send those Tokens to your creators.
Installing Brave Browser on Linux
Open a terminal and follow these steps according to your installed Linux Distribution.
For Debian and Ubuntu-based distributions
First, let’s make sure that we have curl installed on your system, type :
sudo apt install apt-transport-https curl
Now, let’s add Brave’s repository to our system, type :
curl -s https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-core.asc | sudo apt-key --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/brave-browser-release.gpg add -
Then we have to add Brave’s repository to the sources.list.d directory –
echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list
Now, finally update your system and install Brave :
sudo apt update && sudo apt install brave-browser
On Fedora Workstation
First, we have to install dnf plugins if it is already not installed on your system. Type :
sudo dnf install dnf-plugins-core
Now, let’s add the Brave repository to our system and Install Brave :
sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://brave-browser-rpm-release.s3.brave.com/x86_64/
sudo rpm --import https://brave-browser-rpm-release.s3.brave.com/brave-core.asc
sudo dnf install brave-browser
On Arch Linux
Brave is available on Arch Linux as an AUR package. You can install it with the help of an AUR helper such as yay or paru.
yay -S brave-bin
On Manjaro Linux, however, you can simply use Pacman as it is available in the Manjaro repositories :
sudo pacman -S brave-browser
Summary
Despite being open-source, this browser is despised by the Linux community, just like the Vivaldi browser because this browser contributes to Google’s monopoly in the market. However, if you are used to the Chrome or Chromium browser, you can give the Brave browser a try.
