Get the latest Ungoogled Chromium AppImage.

As root create the new folder /opt/ungoogled-chromium/ and save the AppImage there.

The AppImage will be named something like ungoogled-chromium-146.0.7680.80-1-x86_64.AppImage. Rename it to ungoogled-chromium.AppImage so that we can refer to it with a fixed name later.

Make the AppImage executable by anyone with chmod +x ungoogled-chromium.AppImage.

For a proper desktop integration, i.e., have the AppImage show up in the application menu, we need to create a .desktop file and add an icon.

Ungoogled Chromium uses the original Chromium logo respectively icon, which is in the public domain and can be obtained from Wikimedia Commons. Just get the displayed SVG (direct link) and save it to

/opt/ungoogled-chromium/Chromium_Logo.svg

Then, create the file

/usr/share/applications/ungoogled-chromium.desktop

with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Ungoogled Chromium
Exec=/opt/ungoogled-chromium/ungoogled-chromium.AppImage %U
Icon=/opt/ungoogled-chromium/Chromium_Logo.svg
Type=Application
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
MimeType=application/pdf;application/rdf+xml;application/rss+xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xhtml_xml;application/xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;image/webp;text/html;text/xml;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;

Above entry was inspired by this flathub .desktop file.

The Ungoogled Chromium entry should immediately show up in the application menu.

Updating from the Command Line

AppImages are not updated by apt. So we have to take care of that ourselves. The appimageupdatetool helps with that. It's an AppImage itself, so we download it from here, make it executable and run it from /opt/.

Our ungoogled-chromium.AppImage includes the update information required by appimageupdatetool. The one-liner to update from the command line in one go becomes:

root@wauzi:/opt# ./appimageupdatetool.AppImage -O ./ungoogled-chromium/ungoogled-chromium.AppImage

The -O flag tells the tool to overwrite the current AppImage. Without it, your AppImage will be updated to a new file, thus breaking the above created .desktop.

Checking for Updates

The -j flag will return a 1 if an update is available, respectively a 0 if not.

root@wauzi:/opt# ./appimageupdatetool.AppImage -j ./ungoogled-chromium/ungoogled-chromium.AppImage; echo $?
Fetching latest release information from GitHub API
Fetching latest release information from GitHub API
zsync2: Using CA bundle found on system: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
0

Note the 0 on the last line.

#!/bin/bash

# Check for update
./appimageupdatetool.AppImage -j ./ungoogled-chromium/ungoogled-chromium.AppImage

if [ $? ]; then
    echo "Up to date."
else
    echo "Update available."
fi