I've been submitting patches to the Linux kernel for a while now. Staging, networking, media, filesystem. The workflow is quilt, patch series, mailing list review. I'm used to it.
So when I started Aero, a privacy fork of ungoogled-chromium, I figured the patch management would be similar. It's not. Chromium is a different thing entirely.
The first problem is the build. Chromium takes 5+ hours to compile on a quad-core machine. I don't have a machine that can do that. So I'm trying to set up a multi-stage GitHub Actions pipeline. Ungoogled-chromium does this already, they split the build into like 16 sequential jobs with artifacts passed between them, because no single runner can finish within the 6-hour job limit. I'm trying to adapt that.
The second problem is the patch stack. Ungoogled-chromium maintains a patch series against upstream Chromium. Chromium releases every two weeks. Patches break. You rebase. It's manual and it's slow. The goal is to move as much as possible into chromium_src/ overrides and subclassing instead of direct source edits. Fewer patches means less rebase pain. But I haven't figured out the right balance yet.
What Aero actually is: zero ads, zero telemetry, zero crypto, no VPN upsells, fingerprint resistance on by default. No server layer. No proxies, no services, nothing the user has to trust. The technical difference from other forks is supposed to be reproducible builds, so anyone can rebuild from source and verify the binary. That's the part I care about most and the part I haven't started yet.
Stuff I'm still stuck on:
Memory efficiency. Chromium eats RAM. What's a realistic per-tab target without breaking sites? I don't know yet.
Fingerprint resistance. Brave does per-session randomization. That seems right. I haven't implemented anything.
Reproducible builds in CI. Harder than it sounds. I've read some docs but haven't actually done it.
If you've worked on Chromium internals or build systems or patch management at scale, I'd like to hear how you approached any of this. The repo is at https://github.com/builtbyashwin/aero-browser if you want to look.
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