Disable Chrome’s Annoying Notification on First Start from the Linux Command Line

Just for fun/torture, I spent hours trying to figure out how to programmatically remove the stupid pop-up Chrome gives you the first time you launch it. “Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning”… or in my case, hours of searching the internet can save me seconds of clicking the “Ok” button on a stupid popup.

It’s not entirely stupid, though. For context, I manage a virtual machine lab platform where students come to get hands-on experience with Confluent and Apache Kafka stuff. It’s always annoyed me (and probably my users) to have to deal with the box asking to make Chrome the default browser and to send data to Google every time they launch a new VM. Our VM sessions are ephemeral, so students are probably seeing that Google Chrome popup every time they open the browser in the VM, or close to it.

Well, here is the solution. Before you install Chrome, do this:

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/google-chrome
$ touch ~/.config/google-chrome/First\ Run

An empty file called “First Run” must exist in a certain location. That’s it. You’re welcome.