Oh, I See: The Problem is Google

I've been running a Linux box, with Chromium as my preferred browser, for a year-and-a-half now.

Yes, that means I didn't really leave Google World when I abandoned the Chromebox as my desktop computer. I just find Google apps (like Drive) and Chrome apps (like Caret) too damn useful.

Normally, I don't have to worry that much about synchonizing e.g. passwords and bookmarks between machines. For one thing, I use a password manager (LastPass) that's independent of my browser. For another, I have to abandon my desktop in favor of my laptop (still a Chromebook) fairly rarely, because I just don't travel that much.

When I was getting ready to go to PorcFest, I couldn't for the life of me get my Chromebook to sync up with my latest bookmark set (which had changed significantly since the last time I had used the laptop). I ended up manually exporting my bookmarks and manually importing them. No biggie.

Then last night I was setting up the new Raspberry Pi 4. This was a straight Linux Chromium to Linux Chromium change, and there was a handy-dandy "turn on sync" button on the new browser, so I clicked it. It had me sign in to Google, then went to a basic screen full of Google links. But no sync. After trying that two or three times, I went into "settings" and tried to turn on sync. Same problem. No sync.

So, I just installed my preferred extensions and imported my current bookmarks.

Then, this morning, it finally occurred to me to type "Chromium sync doesn't work" into Bing. Per OMG! Ubuntu:

"Users of the Chromium web browser are about to lose access to several key features, including bookmark and password sync. Google is cutting off access to a number of private APIs used in Chromium builds from March 15, 2021."

Bastards.

I haven't started trying to use the Raspberry Pi as my desktop machine yet. Since I'm going to have to tear down everything and set it back up in a few days pursuant to my office re-configuration, it makes more sense to wait and do that once instead of twice. But the Pi is set up, with Raspbian installed and fully updated. I expect I'll move the tower over to the new desk as well and have it there and available in case the Pi doesn't work out (or for occasional use if I want to do things the Pi won't handle, even if it handles most of what I throw at it).