Every time you register on a forum, a website , or create an email account, or even access a new social network, you have to assign a password, which many people usually choose to be easy to remember, or in a bad scenario, use the same one they use for their email account.
In response, many applications and web browsers have included a password generator so that users can use "weak" passwords, but the problem with using a generator lies in having to store the password, which for many is difficult to remember.
For this purpose, there are password managers that store the login credentials for the websites you visit and even for some applications on your desktop.
That's why today we're going to talk about Bitwarden, which is a free, open-source, and above all, cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows, Android, iOS) password manager that also works as an extension on the most popular web browsers and in a very similar way to popular proprietary solutions like Lastpass by keeping your password in a secure cloud database.
The main features that can be highlighted in this password manager are:
- Bitwarden stores all passwords and data information in a secure and encrypted vault. Encryption is kept safe with salty hashing and AES-256 bit encryption.
- Bitwarden works in both Firefox and Google Chrome on Linux or through an installable native Linux desktop application.
- It is possible to host your own Bitwarden password server if you don't trust the cloud service configured to handle your passwords and data by default.
- Bitwarden has a built-in secure password generator to help you break bad habits of reusing passwords.
In addition to these, the best thing about Bitwarden is that it not only works in a web browser through a Firefox or Chrome extension, but also has a native Linux application.
How to install Bitwarden on Linux?
The developers of the Bitwarden password manager offer different packages to install it on Linux , either through a deb package, rpm, flatpak or with an AppImage.
Therefore, for those using a distribution that supports deb packages , you can obtain the latest stable version of the Bitwarden client from its official website in the downloads section, or if you prefer, you can download it with the following command from a terminal:
wget https://github.com/bitwarden/desktop/releases/download/v1.16.6/Bitwarden-1.16.6-amd64.deb
After downloading, you can install the client with your preferred package manager or from a terminal with:
sudo dpkg -i Bitwarden-1.16.6-amd64.deb
Now , for those using a system with RPM support, the package they should use is the following:
wget https://github.com/bitwarden/desktop/releases/download/v1.16.6/Bitwarden-1.16.6-x86_64.rpm
And they install with:
sudo rpm -i Bitwarden-1.16.6-x86_64.rpm
Now, to install from the appimage file that we can download with:
wget https://github.com/bitwarden/desktop/releases/download/v1.16.6/Bitwarden-1.16.6-x86_64.AppImage
Done the download We must give the file execution permissions with:
sudo chmod a+x Bitwarden-1.16.6-x86_64.AppImage
And they run with:
./Bitwarden-1.16.6-x86_64.AppImage
The other method we have to install Bitwarden on almost all current Linux distributions, it is with the help of Flatpak packages.
For this we must have support to be able to install applications of this type in the system. Knowing that you have Flatpak support on your system, just open a terminal in and run the following command in it:
flatpak install --user https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/com.bitwarden.desktop.flatpakref
And ready with it, you will have installed the application on your system.
Simply search for the application within your application menu to launch it on your system.
If you can't find it, you can run the application on your system with the following command from the terminal:
flatpak run com.bitwarden.desktop
Now if you want to remove this application, just delete the appimage file that you downloaded or if you installed with Flatpak just run this command in the terminal:
flatpak uninstall com.bitwarden.desktop