chromium-browser fails to start after upgrade to eoan

In eoan chromium-browser is a transitional package that installs the chromium snap.

You hit an unsupported home directory setup, apparently: snapd assumes a home directory mounted under /home.

This is similar to bug #1849371, even though the error message is slightly different, and it fails at a different stage. I'll mark it a duplicate bug.

Quoting Zygmunt: « The limitation on HOME is well known and for now has no workaround other than to bind mount whatever custom home directory to /home/$LOGNAME. »

Thanks Olivier,

I could imagine that you'll get several other bug reports where people do not see how the underlying problem relates to "Cannot run chromium as user www-data because home directory is /var/www" - but I guess the issue is the same.

Btw, I've been using Linux for over 25 years and I don't understand the quote you mention and why snapd would be chosen to manage standard packages, if it (apparently) is broken (at least somebody is working on a fix, according to "Zygmunt's quote", mentioning "_for now_ has no workaround"). Home directories commonly are mounted (at least in professional environments) and quite commonly linked into /home/, and there never has been any problem with this, to the contrary, it solves many a headache (until now, as it seems). Feel free to send me back to old-fart-country where I came from, I'm just bothered by update-routines that break (standard!) environments.

If snap is broken and cannot deal with standard setups (this much I understand from the other bug and what I find in relation to "Zygmunt's quote"), may be it should be fixed before being included in the handling of standard packages?

OTOH, may be Ubuntu doesn't target professional environments. The solution of course is fine if the target audience are people who setup every new laptop from scratch and never work in networked environments (*scnr*).

I understand your frustration, and I'm sorry this is breaking your workflow.
Be assured that this bug (and others reported against the chromium snap package) is a top priority.

The point of the transition of chromium-browser to a snap package in 19.10 is precisely to uncover this kind of problems early on, before the next LTS (20.04), and to ensure everything works smoothly by then. I'd suggest you stick to the current LTS for professional environments if this problem is unacceptable.

Thanks!

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I don't think that its the same cause...

Got the same problem on 20.04 LTS. Btw, Debian sid manages to get chromium packged as a normal deb as well...

This is not really an advertisement for snap as it doesn't manage such simple applications like a browser...