chromium from the repos

Chromium is my preferred web browser, but you can't get an up-to-date version of it in every distro's repos. For those distros, I use Google Chrome. Either way, I change the startup page to the DuckDuckGo homepage, make DuckDuckGo the default search engine, and adjust the privacy settings -- for example, in Chrome I turn off the option to "Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google."

Debian Stable has chromium-browser in the repos, but it never gets updated to anything close to the latest version. Right now in the Squeeze repos, I see chromium-browser 6.0.472.63; but, the Wheezy (testing) branch has 18.0.1025.151, and in Sid (unstable) it's at 20.0.1132.21.

Mepis relies on the Debian Stable repos, so its Chromium version is out-dated. They have chromium-browser in their Community Repos, backported from Debian Sid, but they don't update it very often in the Community Repos. From what I gather from the Mepis forums, the last "bump" from Sid was to 13.x -- back in September 2011 (!).

SalineOS also uses the Stable repos.

In my fully-updated PCLinuxOS installation, I see chromium-browser at 16.0.912.63; not bad, but still lagging behind. I added Google Chrome Beta to PCLOS, but in their system I don't know how to get updates for it, so I simply reinstall it every month or so.

At this time, Fedora doesn't include Chromium in the official repository, but users can add a repo for it -- see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Chromium. In earlier Fedora versions, I felt that Chromium from the unofficial repos lagged behind a bit, so in Fedora 17 I installed Google Chrome and decided to leave it at that (for now).

Ubuntu does a great job with chromium-browser. In all of the releases from 10.04 (Lucid) to 12.04 (Precise), Ubuntu Package Search curently shows chromium-browser at 18.0.1025.151. I saw regular updates coming into Lucid all the way up until I switched to Precise shortly after that release came out.

Of the distros installed here, openSUSE 12.1 has the most up-to-date build, at 21.0.1145.0.

Users can, of course, go outside of the repos to install the Chromium web browser (a web search will produce links to further details), but doing that seems to be a bit of a hassle, and I don't think you can update it via the package managers; and, maybe I'm just lazy. In any case, I'd rather just install Chrome instead of bothering with all that.