KaOS rocks! It feels very polished and super swift.
But my biggest gripe so far is the absence of the chromium-browser in the main repository. I strongly prefer it over google-chrome, but since it's such a huge project building and keeping it up to date myself seems like quite the hassle.

I don't understand the subject matter very deeply to be honest and I would like to get an idea of the reasons. What is the advantage of having chrome, or what are disadvantages or hurdles of packaging chromium instead?

QupZilla, while it's nice, tends to freeze on me and generally lacks usable developer tools.

Anyway, keep up the awesome.

Chrome because it is complete. When using the chromium source you still will need to get chrome source for much needed parts like pdf viewer, widevine. So it really makes no sense to build one then get the other to make a complete experience.
Sothe whole idea of using open source is gone then anyway.

I personally don't care about widevine but I guess others will feel different. PDF also has multiple options available. How do they actually do it on other distros, like Arch? Any closed binaries involved? I'm having a hard time finding any good information on this, as usual it is obfuscated by sheer quantity.

I personally am not super happy to entrust google of all companies to build and deliver such an essential and sensitive tool. As far as I understand it's not feasible to proof that there are absolutely no parts added that we don't know about.

KaOS is an independent distribution

well, no it isn't, but that is a very unrealistic statement anyway.

Why such statements? As you say you are new here, but you know better than anyone here what KaOS is or it is not?
If you don't like to use Google, then why use it? there are other browsers available, please don't start making this a trolling thread.

Sorry I don't understand why you are offended. I'm asking questions because I do not know, or couldn't find yet the answers to them, hoping someone could help to satisfy my curiosity. Instead I am getting accused of trolling.

I admit that the statement about KaOS being dependent was uncalled for and is not true in the sense that nobody is forced to install the google-chrome package. Why I want to use it? Because besides being an awesome browser, it's developer tools outclass any other alternatives that I have tried so far. Because I'm a web developer, this is important to me.

At the same time my believe is that we are living in a time where information equals power. So I try to be conscious about not aiding to much in large scale harvesting of such information. That's why I feel less uneasy when using chromium compared to chrome, even if of course chromium will also not provide me with 100% privacy protection. But that's personal preference and to each their own. I was only curious to find out what motivated the decision to package chrome over chromium.

I'm gonna hazard the guess that simplicity plays a role - not having to adapt, integrate and build the chromium project and instead taking a more complete solution. That's fine and completely reasonable, in fact if it's so important to me I may as well create my own chromium package for the KCP. I'm considering it, even if I would have to greatly increase my knowledge about building and packaging software.

But I really only wanted to learn. If you perceived my response as rude, then I probably got a little emotional because I was not satisfied with your explanation. For that I apologize. Please understand that I did not intend to make any accusations, just express my personal believes to explain why that even matters to me.

Your question was answered why chrome and not chromium. Now that answer is not correct either? You seem to make statements as to why you think it is not used. Those are complete wrong. For such builds there is a build-server available. Major builds like libreoffice ( 1 1/2 hour build time on the 8 core build-server), qtwebengine (build from chromium source) and so on are all source builds. Libreoffice according to your description would be shipped as binary here, instead of source build....
It is totally fine not to agree what is in and what is not in the repos, that is why (as explained in the packaging guide) pacman/makepkg are in use here, so it is very well possible to build and add your own.

According to what description? Please don't make false statements about me making false statements.
I might regret taking the bait but whatever, here we go, one thing after another.

Your first answer was not incorrect, I merely said it didn't satisfy my curiosity. For that reason I stated that I'm making further assumptions. Those assumptions can, and obviously must be complete fiction. But the statement itself is inherently impossible to disprove and unlikely to be a lie. Someone claiming to draw a picture in his head is a long way from someone claiming a truth and I believe those things should not be that hard to tell apart. It bothers me that you seem to have the impression that I was doing the latter. Technicalities, I know..

But know it get's more confusing because I cannot at all understand where you picked up that you are not shipping any source builds. While I don't know the exact definition of "shipping" in this context, my understanding is that e.g. libreoffice is indeed shipped as in binary, which got compiled on the build-server. And that is a very good thing because most end users don't want to spend half a day compiling the sources, let alone figure out how to do it. But that left aside, I was only and exclusively talking about the google-chrome package in the paragraph from which you might have extracted those strange things.

Now taken from google-chrome PKGBUILD:
source=("google-chrome-unstable_${pkgver}_amd64.deb::https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-unstable_current_amd64.deb"
Please correct me if I'm wrong but I thought that means the whole thing is compiled by google.
And I repeat, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I don't think you have any obligation whatsoever to build it yourself. Especially since thus far I seem to be the only one wo states an interest in chromium for KaOS.

And that was the main intention of this thread, to get a discussion going and see if anyone shares this interest. Not to point fingers and complain. That's also why at the start I tried to express how pleased I am by this distro, compared to others. I'm sorry you missed it. Really hope you just had a bad day.