Ubuntu – Netflix desktop doesn’t launch when I click on it

The best way to remove Netflix Desktop (see also official site) depends on how you installed it.

So far, Netflix Desktop is not available in any of Ubuntu's official software sources. So the project maintains a PPA. You most likely installed it that way.

If you installed netflix-desktop from the PPA:

If you're planning to reinstall Netflix Desktop soon, your best bet it to just remove the package installed from the PPA (without removing the PPA).

Otherwise the best thing to do is to purge the PPA from your configured software sources and uninstall netflix-desktop (and any other packages that might be installed from it--that PPA does provide other pacakges as well, and unless you know you want them, you probably don't).

Purging the PPA and all the software installed from it can be done with a single command--but you may need to install the command first. This does both:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:ehoover/compholio

Even if you've already removed just the package with sudo apt-get remove netflix-desktop, you can still remove the PPA and any other packages installed from it with the above ppa-purge command. (See this question if you're interested in details of how ppa-purge, and its alternatives, work.)

If you got nextflix-desktop the old way, unpacking the archive in your home folder:

Before the PPA, Netflix Desktop was installed by unpacking an archive to a .netflix-desktop folder inside the user's home folder. As blogged, you can remove that by running:

rm -Rf ~/.netflix-desktop

Be very careful when you run that. If you accidentally put a space between ~ an / or / and ., you'll delete your whole home directory, including all your documents!

(If you prefer to remove the .netflix-desktop folder from the comfort of a GUI, open a Nautilus window, navigate to your home folder if you're not already there, press Ctrl+H to click View > Show Hidden Files, and delete the .netflix-desktop folder.)

If you were using Netflix Desktop installed this way, you might want to try the newer version from the PPA; it may work better for you. And if you used the old version and then tried the PPA version without removing the old version, you may be able to fix some problems with it by removing the folder from the old version and starting over.

As of 2016-06-13, the only mean to watch Netflix on Linux is through Chrome. If Chrome is not available in your distribution, you cannot watch Netflix. Since Chrome is not available for Linux ARM, you cannot watch Netflix on any ARM devices, including pretty much all devices Ubuntu Touch is actively worked on. Note that one can get a Ubuntu Touch image for x86 systems here.

Chrome comes with the Widevine extension which Netflix use. This extension complies with Encrypted Media Extensions. Google acquired the technology on December 3, 2010 by buying Widevine Technologies inc.

There was a campaign on Indiegogo named World's First True made for Linux/Ubuntu x86/x64 Tablet where an Intel tablet is proposed. Since it was Intel based, Chrome should have worked on it. But alas, the campaign failed to raise the money.