Written 2025.02.20

I wanted to try out the Zen Browser on Linux, but discovered that it's not available in a repository. So I downloaded the x86 Tarball, because I didn't want to use either Flathub or AppImage to manage it. Here are the steps I took to install it.

Steps to install

1. Extract the Tarball and inspect the files
   1. It extracted to a zen directory into my Downloads folder, and it didn't have any of the typical installation files or references on moving forward; it looked more like an application directory.
      1. I was looking for README, INSTALL, configure, etc., but none of these existed, and there were no files at the same level of the zen folder
   2. I navigated to the folder in a terminal and ran zen, and lo and behold, the browser opened!
      1. However, I found that I could not pin the application to the task bar, so I would need to look into that.
2. Move the folder to an application folder
   1. Rather than move the browser to a shared location, I created the folder ~/apps^[1] and copied zen into it.
   2. To make it so that I could open the application from any terminal, I created a link to the application in the PATH Variable using ln ~/apps/zen/zen ~/bin/zen
3. Create a desktop entry file to allow pinning in my desktop environment
   1. Create and edit the desktop file in your profile's .local applications folder: nano ~/.local/share/applications/zen-browser.desktop
   2. Added the information found below
   3. Make the file executable: chmod +x ~/.local/share/applications/zen-browser.desktop
   4. It worked for me immediately, but if it doesn't work for you, log out, then log back in again.

After all that, I decided I like Firefox better. I guess I'm still not ready to move my tabs to a side column ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

zen-browser.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Zen Browser
Comment=Browse the web with Zen Browser
Exec=/home/max/apps/zen/zen %U
Icon=/home/max/apps/zen/browser/chrome/icons/default/default128.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;