[Feature]: make playwright fallback to latest ubuntu version for OS like Fedora or Arch Linux

[evan0greenup]

🚀 Feature Request

Fedora or Arch Linux have packages which is usually newer than Ubuntu and Debian.

Even if neither Fedora nor Arch Linux is currently supported by playwright, it make more sense to use latest Ubuntu release as fallback for those OS.

Currently, playwright use oldest Ubuntu release as fallback for those OS, the package version different is much more bigger, and more library is not compatible.

Example

Use Ubuntu 24.04 or Debian 13 or newer as fallback.

Motivation

This will save user more time to install additional missing library into OS like Arch Linux or Fedora.

[yury-s]

We can bump the version, but I'm not sure how it helps on Fedora and Arch linuxes which don't use .deb packages. Can you explain?

[evan0greenup]

@yury-s , I am an Arch Linux user, I am going to install the system dependency manually, by pacman -F <so-name>.

If playwright use Ubuntu 24.04 as fallback, only icu and libffi is incompatible. But if use Ubuntu 20.04 as fallback, more packages like libwebp and libavif are incompatible.

[yury-s]

If I understand correctly, you only need the list of missing .so libraries and not the dpkg package names. If that's the case, Missing libraries: printed at the end of the error message when you try to launch the browser should enumerate all the libs, can you use that instead of running install for an unsupported platform?