Running the brave browser on Linux

On some Linux systems the brave browser starts with an error stating Unsupported command-line flag: –no-sandbox. The browser works but this behavior is at least … annoying.

The reason behind this, that for security reasons the brave browser wants to run a session in a user namespace.

When you - like me - start brave with just a call to brave it detects if the system supports it, and if not calls the sub process with the -no-sandbox parameter resulting in the error stated above. Though one can argue that a better design of presenting that error (or warning) this is just to tell you you should reconfigure your running kernel.

To temporarily enable your kernel to support user namespace you can type the following command:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/unprivileged_userns_clone

Note: Has to be run with root privileges.

When restarting brave the error message should now be gone. To make it available once and for all type:

sysctl -w kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1