Helium Flatpak

This repository contains the Flatpak manifest for Helium, a private, fast, and honest web browser based on Ungoogled Chromium.

It wraps the official prebuilt binaries from the Helium Linux project into a partially sandboxed Flatpak environment, ensuring it runs consistently across different Linux distributions.
Full sandbox protection is currently not supported.

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Installation (Recommended)

The easiest way to install Helium is using the standalone bundle. This bypasses the need for manual repositories and works on any system with Flatpak installed.

1. Download the latest .flatpak bundle from the Releases Page.

2. Install it via the command line, in the directory where you downloaded the file:

   flatpak install ./helium-[VERSION]-[ARCH].flatpak
   

   Note: on some distributions, you can simply double-click the downloaded file to install it via your Software Center.

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Building from Source

If you want to build the package yourself or contribute to the manifest, follow these steps.

Prerequisites

Ensure you have flatpak and flatpak-builder installed. You also need the Flathub repository enabled to download the Freedesktop SDK/Runtime (version 24.08).

flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak install org.freedesktop.Sdk/x86_64/24.08

Build & Install

Run the following command in the root of this repository. This will download the binary, build the sandbox, and install it to your user directory.

For x86_64 systems:

flatpak-builder --arch=x86_64 --user --install --force-clean build-dir net.imput.helium.yml

For ARM64 systems:

flatpak-builder --arch=aarch64 --user --install --force-clean build-dir net.imput.helium.yml

Note: to install for all users, use sudo and replace '--user' with '--system'.

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Running the App

Once installed (via bundle or local build), you can launch Helium from your application menu or via the terminal:

flatpak run net.imput.helium

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Uninstallation

To remove Helium and its data:

flatpak uninstall net.imput.helium
# Optional: Remove app data
rm -rf ~/.var/app/net.imput.helium

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Disclaimer: This is an unofficial packaging project. For issues related to the browser itself, please refer to the upstream repository. For packaging issues, feel free to open an issue here.