Upgrading Chrome in Ubuntu - Fixing the "Dependency is not satisfiable: libglib2.0-0" error

Chrome is an ever-green browser, meaning that the application is constantly being updated. Running it on Ubuntu occasionally leads to a problem where the distro build is behind the latest available version. Within the app itself, we're then prompted to upgrade, with Chrome flagging that it can't update via normal Ubuntu update channels.

Chrome Warning
In-app warning in Chrome

Going to the Chrome site, downloading the .deb, then double-clicking it to install it locally leads to the below error in the software manager UI:

Depending is not satisfiable: libglib2.0-0
Unmet dependency, no installation possible!

The Fix

After downloading the .deb from the Chrome site, in the console run the below commands:

cd ~/Downloads
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install -f

After running these commands, re-start Chrome, and you should be looking at the latest and greatest version!

Why does this work from the command line and not the GUI?

It can be a little confusing at first to understand why this works, when running the installation of the same dpkg from the GUI fails. After all, isn't the GUI just a thin wrapper around dpkg, apt, and the like? Well, mostly, yes, but with a small difference.

In this case, dpkg -i forces the installation without checking or resolving missing dependencies. If there are missing dependencies, dpkg won't try to fix them, it will just install what it can. However, the Software Manager tool does dependency resolution. So if libglib2.0.0 (?=2.39.4) isn't on your system, the Software Manager refuses to install it.

Google will often build Chrome to be backwards-compatible with slightly older versions of system libraries, as they can't be sure that every user will be running the most up-to-date version of Linux. In this case, I'm running 24.04 (an LTS release), with 25.04 just released - not an ancient system. So Chrome will run fine from the packaged download. The .deb pacakge metadata tends to be more conservative - it may declare stricter dependencies than absolutely necessary, to avoid crashes on genuinely old systems.

Cleanup

When running the commands, you may notice that Chrome works after the sudo dpkg -i .. step. The sudo apt-get install -f tells apt to fix missing dependencies, if it can and if needed. In this case, not absolutely necessary, but good housekeeping if you're going to try forcing this kind of installation!

Tags:linux
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