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I am on Kubuntu 24.04 and I see when I open my Chrome browser the indication that New Chrome available and Chrome is out of date
I don't see chrome reported in my software updates so I run the following command:

$sudo apt-get update  
$ sudo apt-get --only-upgrade install google-chrome-stable 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
google-chrome-stable is already the newest version (129.0.6668.70-1).
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
  mailcap
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove it.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

My browser was closed when I run this and when I reopened it I still see the indication on my top right part New Chrome available. When I check in the help menu the version reported is Version 129.0.6668.70 (Official Build)

So what is the issue here? Is there a way to fix this? If not, how can I re-install Chrome and can I do it without losing my accounts that I log in?

UPDATE in response to the answer from user10489

There is a file named: google-chrome.list.distUpgrade and when I see the content it says:

### THIS FILE IS AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURED ###   
# You may comment out this entry, but any other modifications may be lost.   
# deb [arch=amd64] https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main # deactivated during upgrade in noble
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2 Answers 2

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Look in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and see if you have a file named like google-chome.list or similar.

In that file, there should be a line starting with deb. Make sure that line is not commented out. If it is, remove the # at the beginning and re-run the apt update/upgrade.

If you ran a do-release-upgrade or otherwise upgraded the major release of Ubuntu since you installed google chrome, that repo gets disabled during the upgrade and must be manually re-enabled afterwards. During the upgrade, a comment is added to the file indicating this. (And your comments indicate that this happened when you upgraded to noble.)

The file always contains a comment saying that modifications to the file may be lost. This means that when chrome gets updated, it may update the contents of that file. Even if the file does get updated, the enabled/disabled state of the deb line is preserved. The comment means exactly what it says.

Also, if you have a google-chrome.list.distUpgrade file, apt will ignore that file, as it is a backup of the other file named above. If you don't have a corresponding google-chrome.list file, rename the distUpgrade file back, and edit it to remove the # in front of deb. Otherwise, you can delete he backup file and edit the .list file instead.

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  • It is indeed commented out mentioning due to upgrade to noble. What does that mean? Commented Dec 1, 2024 at 15:40
  • Also when it says: You may comment out this entry, but any other modifications may be lost. what does this mean? What other modifications? Commented Dec 1, 2024 at 15:45
  • "due to upgrade to noble" means exactly what it says and what is already in my answer. During the OS upgrade, the upgrader disabled this third party repo (and possibly others). The google chrome repo in particular is safe to re-enable without changes after the upgrade, so follow the instructions in the answer so you can get chrome updates again. Commented Dec 1, 2024 at 19:04
  • I had done an Kubuntu upgrade indeed after installing Google in the previous version. Commented Dec 1, 2024 at 20:01
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    So after doing sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list.distUpgrade /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list and then removing the # from the line you mentioned, I run sudo apt-get update and then sudo apt-get --only-upgrade install google-chrome-stable and it worked! I no longer see that chrome outdate warning and the version is: 131.0.6778.85 (Official Build) . Should I keep the new file I created or delete it? Commented Dec 1, 2024 at 20:10
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I had seen the same since upgrading from Ubuntu 22.04.3 to 24.04.1 LTS.

Following the suggestions in the other answer the google-chrome related files were:

$ ls /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.*
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list.distUpgrade
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list.save
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.sources

The google-chrome.list.distUpgrade file has commented out contents:

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list.distUpgrade 
### THIS FILE IS AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURED ###
# You may comment out this entry, but any other modifications may be lost.
# deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main # disabled on upgrade to noble

The google-chrome.list.save file doesn't contain commented out contents:

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list.save 
### THIS FILE IS AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURED ###
# You may comment out this entry, but any other modifications may be lost.
deb [arch=amd64] http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main

Copied the google-chrome.list.save file to google-chrome.list:

 sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list.save /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list

After the above, sudo apt upgrade google-chrome-stable updated from 128.0.6613.113-1 to 131.0.6778.85-1 and the New Chrome available has disappeared from the Chrome browser in which are typing this.

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