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Why Is Adobe Flash On Linux Still Broken?
mwilliamson writes "As I sit reading my morning paper online I still cannot view the embedded videos due to auto-detection of my Flash player not working. One in every three or four YouTube videos crashes the browser. I remember sometime back reading that Adobe has a very small development team (possibly only one) working on the Linux port of Flash. It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system. No matter how stably, smoothly, efficiently, and correctly Linux runs on a machine, the public will continue to view it as second-rate if Flash keeps crashing. This is the worst example of being tied down and bound by a crappy 3rd-party product over which no Linux distribution has any control. GNASH is nice, but it just isn't there 100%. I really do have to suspect Adobe's motivation for keeping Flash on Linux in such a deplorable state."
Adopt Silverlight!
Flash (and Silverlight, et al) are a threat to the Internet generally. I wouldn't run Flash even if they bothered to create a version that runs on my OS (64-bit Linux).
The more of use that don't use Flash, the better.
So there is no version of Flash that is open source then?
The disadvantage of not being able to play Flash is mostly on sites like YouTube. But some other sites are also using Flash for the interesting content.
So the big question is - is it possible to implement a Flash player for Linux that's open source?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
works for me
Are you still on Firefox 2? I had those problems but they went away with the upgrade to Firefox 3 (I'm on Ubuntu).
Can any native browser comply with the W3 SVG validation tests? AM
The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. - HGTTG
Flash 9.0.124.0 crashes all the time on my wife's Windows XP system running Firefox as well. Most of the time it exhibits as not being able to play sound. So it definitely isn't limited to Linux. Flash is just crap.
That should be modded subtly insightful. There really is no alternative to flash. To quote Danny DeVito, "there's no winning... only various degrees of losing."
I used to have this happen to be on Ubuntu 8.04. I fixed it by downloading the official version of Flash from the Adobe website and replacing all of the versions of the .so on my computer. Wouldn't you know it, it worked again. I think the problem is that the version in Ubuntu 8.04 was hacked up to support PulseAudio. When I removed PulseAudio, suddenly audio didn't work anymore (in addition to, you know, the crashing all the time), but when I replaced the .so, it did again. So I recommend going to the Adobe website and getting the official version, because it does work.
Poor Flash is the one major barrier? Pah - there are a number of more pressing issues, like poor wireless support (on the driver level), poor opensource drivers and closed drivers being difficult to configure manually, poor multimedia support on the API level (using SDL helps a bit though), iffy ACPI support on a number of systems, negligible vendor preloads, and probably a number of other things.
That said, excellent flash support would certainly be nice.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I've noticed, at least since I switched from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3, that when Adobe Flash Player 9 ( or 10 ) is installed the browser exhibits sporadic lockups and crashes when navigating the Web -- not just when viewing Flash video or a site that makes heavy use of Flash, although that does seem to increase the odds of the browser eating itself.
After the release of Firefox 3.0 I opted to install Adobe Flash Player 10 Beta. The performance was much better as was the video quality and I didn't experience as many crashes. This all changed when Adobe updated the Beta and the details can be found in the bug report that I filed here. To summarize, after the update, Flash Player 10 would cause the browser to segfault and lockup so frequently, sometimes even upon startup, that the browser became unusable -- I had to downgrade to Flash Player 9. Currently there is someone from Adobe assigned to work on the "problem" whatever it is, but I haven't heard anything in weeks.
jdb2
I experienced frequent Firefox crashes due to Flash in my Ubuntu box, which went being upgraded from 6.06 to 7.04 to 7.10 to 8.04. But then my hard disk crashed and I had to reinstall Ubuntu 8.04 from scratch. It's been now three months of this fresh installation, and in this period Flash has never, ever, crashed my Firefox. It's been rock solid.
My wild guess then would be that your setup is half-broken much like mine was. Try that old Windows trick of wiping your hard disk and reinstalling your Linux distribution, whatever it is. It might be the solution.
Now, this doesn't mean Flash in Linux isn't still full of bugs. It not respecting transparencies and correct depth levels in pages is a major annoyance. But at least crashing isn't part of the list anymore, at least for me.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Flash is a great channel to provide commercial products (video, ads, DRM'ed shit).
It's no threat at all when Flash isn't abused as website critical table of contents.
To comment on the OP: have you already tried the version 10 release candidate? It's supposed to support new audio API's and hardware acceleration.
"It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system."
Just one major barrier? Only one? You sure about that?
Running gentoo 2008.0 amd64 on an intel processor, firefox 3.0.1
flash 9.0.124.0
nspluginwrapper 0.9.91.5-r1
everything works flawlessly. Maybe you need to rebuild your flash
Adobe has a gun and should use it:
"http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/story.aspx?guid={AE3FB7A4-EE47-436B-ADF0-0C45AC172F8C}&siteid=rss"
They just don't care because there are no real competitors to Flash. For most mainstream sites today, Flash is mandatory. (And no amount of boycott will change that.)
I think the best way to fix this is by subversion and infiltration. Boycotts don't work. They haven't worked with Vista and won't work with Flash.
The Linux community needs to stop thinking it can "boycott" things like protocols, and file formats and instead, work to make alternate applications that can work with those file formats and protocols to eat the other guy's lunch.
Every time I install Ubuntu, I just add FlashBlock and I am set. Life is too short to waste my time to Flash enormous appetite for CPU power. For casual user it actually works - just avoid 10 tabs and 5 windows. Yes, I am waiting for Swfdec and Gnash to knock Adobe out of it's monopoly for Flash player. I would like to both teams come together and try to finish stuff, but it is up to them.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I suggest the read of penguin.swf blogosplat which is Adobe's blog for posting new version of flash for linux (such as the recent Flash 10 beta or the new alpha)
With a real soundcard that has HW mixing, Flash works fine, no crashing or hanging.. :D
A Sound Blaster Live is pretty cheap these days
You'll have Pulseaudio tell you different, but if you use a pure Alsa for your sound, you'll find Flash--and everything else that uses sound--runs MUCH better.
I have no idea why Pulseaudio has been thrust into various distributions, it's cumbersome at best, outright broken at worst. There's nothing Pulseaudio brings to the table that's needed. Application volume sliders? Anything that outputs volume already has a volume slider, why do I need another one? Sound over the network? Is this REALLY a feature people want at the expense of a huge majority of programs not working? And what's wrong with ESD for this?
So do yourself a favor, and remove all the Pulseaudio stuff from your distro.
far from the now mature process of download/click/wait/enjoy, the process involved getting just the right software version, installing it manually in the correct location, maybe hacking around with .INI files and then crossing your fingers that the mean-time-between-crashes was longer than the time it took to print your document.
So it is with installing flash on FF3/U_x64. The process basically sucks and as said, provides a sufficiently bad user experience to turn normal people off Linux for years.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"I really do have to suspect Adobe's motivation for keeping Flash on Linux in such a deplorable state."
This is an irksome statement. I doubt Adobe has an interest in making Linux look bad. Isn't there a saying, "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence."
Probably what would work better here is, "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by business sense." Linux is 4%ish of the desktop market so it would make sense that 4% (or less, but certainly not more) of Adobe flash development go to linux porting. 4% of their development just isn't going to make Flash as good as it is on other platforms, and I doubt they are receiving a lot of money from linux distros to change this.
Yeah it sucks if you use linux but no need to point a finger at Adobe. Its simple dollars and cents (or sense).
Flash doesn't work completely reliably on any platform I have tried. I find that Adobe Flash on 32bit Linux works about as well as the OS X version (meaning: it's usable but it does have occasional problems).
The main problem people are having is that there is no 64bit Linux version of Flash, so all you can do is run it in some emulated environment.
Adobe cares about the folks buying expensive site and server licenses. Those guys don't really care about you because there aren't enough of ya to have much impact on their website's success, so why should adobe invest in your platform, besides the bare minimum quality implementation as a hedge in case desktop linux becomes more important some day. There's no economic incentive.
What does it say if Adobe only has 1 employee (if that) working on the linux Flash port and he's doing a better job than GNASH and open source development?
If you really feel so strongly about Flash's importance, maybe you should help turn GNASH into a viable solution.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Dear Internet,
why isn't Adobe fixing their products that run on an operating system that is for them a niche market? Why can't I watch my youtubes on linux?
This is what keeps people from the linux, please fix it now Adobe, even though you have very little to gain.
Love,
Someone you won't make money from ever
Why exactly is this on slashdot? This one paragraph of "ye olde flash whine" without any links hardly constitutes something newsworthy.
The diversity of Linux makes it difficult. Read the early posts on the developer's blog for details.
I guess I'm just lucky, but I don't have any problems under either Gentoo or Ubuntu, at least not with Flashplayer 9. With the FP10 alpha I had similar problems, but that's an alpha and I was happy it was released along the Win/Mac versions. I haven't tested the RC yet, I only just now found it was out.
Cut them some slack. The situation for Flash on Linux has improved tremendously. I think that shows that Adobe has recognized the importance that market has, and given some time, I'm sure they'll fix the remaining issues.
And yes, 64 bits. I know. But AFAIK there isn't one for Windows 64, either (is there?), so it's more than just a recompile as some suggest.
to use the standard linux zealot language...
I see your pissy entitlement and raise you a 'code it yourself'
When you look to BUY an Adobe product, there doesn't seem to be a "Linux" choice (only Mac or Windows).
I've got Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my work machine, still running FF 2 (haven't gotten around to upgrading to 3 yet), and the Flash plugin works fine. I think it causes the browser to crash maybe once every few months, and then it's always 1) when I've had the browser open a long time without restarting, and 2) some complicated, overstuffed SWF gets opened and it just tips things over the edge.
Aside from that (and the wmode thing), I don't really have any trouble with Flash. And lest you think I don't use it enough, I work for a website that has Flash embedded on nearly every page, sometimes multiple times, and we host hundreds of Flash games. So it's not like I'm not loading a lot of Flash.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Ymmv, etc., etc..
I'm using the newest version of Flash on Ubuntu 8.04.1 (32-bit, because I don't actually need 64-bit at this time) with no major problems whatsoever. The only minor problem I have is that if I watch too many videos in a row, Firefox's RAM allotment chokes and crashes the browser.
... What distro/bit-type/browser are you using?
I'm curious, kdawson
Hopefully, competition from Microsoft will force Adobe to get its act together. (That will be the last nice thing I say about Microsoft this year.)
Prevent Windows piracy. Use Linux instead.
I wish they would write a version for Linux (good luck though!)
I have the same problem with Flash on Windows. What does that mean to the public?
Linux users dont buy software. There is no revenue stream there. Plus, the user base is too small. Businesses are not charity, they aren't going to cater to a group that is more likely to pirate their goods than buy them. Sure, flash is free, but flash is used for distributing media and generating ad revenue. However, will linux users patronize advertisers? Its not likel bases on their other non-purchasing behavior.
There's various bug reports about this with regards to Pulseaudio and Flash--as well as numerous othat applications--in all major distributions that have packaged Pulseaudio by default. I'm not going to link all the bug reports in a slashdot comment, but you can search for them yourself.
The story and summary seems to be calling out Adobe on this issue, when it's not really their fault. If PA didn't have as many compatibility issues with alsa applications as it has, Flash would work fine.
It's unfair to call out Adobe on this issue. It expects a working alsa implementation, and when it has to use Pluseaudio's version of the virtual device, it crashes. Adobe doesn't have any control over the faultily implementation. So if there's a story that's about Flash crashing fine, but let's put the blame where it belongs here.
Yeah, good thing Apple is pushing for a Flash-free web, then, eh - and providing the tools to achieve that, as well.
..frankly Adobe (and other major software vendors) is one of the main barriers to adoption of Linux as a desktop platform.
I'm on Mac OS Leopard and the only thing it'd take to make me move to Linux is to be able to get the Adobe, Microsoft and other suites of professional applications on Linux. That's na' ga' happen. Wouldn't be prudent for Adobe, Microsoft, et al.
And Gdammit (beta), don't tell me that GIMP is just as good as Photoshop. Just don't. It's not, just not, just so very NOT. And there are a million other reasons that the other Adobe tools rock so thoroughly more than the best creative tools you can find on Linux.
So Flash - a product from a giant software vendor that you need serious power-tools to create well (yes, I'm quite aware that the SWF spec is open) - is broken on Linux, AND you can't get the power-tools to create it. I'll shed the tiny tears for Flash (which sucks, in most cases), and the big tears for Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Fireworks (new version is gonna rock), Lightwave 3D, MS Excel, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro and a hundred other tools that are must-haves within their disciplines.
I dont have any problem with flash, its a little slow initializing in Konqueror, but that must be due to the nsplugin loading. Also works fine in Iceweasel 3. I dont experience crashing, I didnt even know that was a problem. However, the biggest complaint I here from the Linux users I talk to is performance, full screen isnt so good. OpenGL acceleration would be nice. I dont like flash either, but it works.
Of course it's possible to implement Flash with free software, but that won't solve the problem. Free software is a powerful enough development method to overcome CSS, the Windows API, SMB, and DX. What task do you think is out of reach? The problem then is one of a legal framework that makes it impossible to distribute free software that works with broken media like DVDs and websites that use Flash. There are technical solutions but legal solutions are better. Software patents and the DMCA must go.
There are several technical solutions to broken media. One is for individuals to ignore bad laws and just get DeCSS. A better one is to code around YouTube like Clive does. You can also simply avoid non free media, after all the Internet Archive, Wikipedia and Creative Commons have multiple lifetimes worth of excellent entertainment and education. Most of these send a clear message that Flash, Silverlight and other non free media is broken. Competing technology and it's users are going to win.
Legal solutions are better. We would not have problems with broken media if people were allowed to share their solutions. Laws that prohibit people from sharing free software are always wrong and should never have passed. Modern copyright law is at odds with its purpose and must be reformed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
s/ On Linux//;
Flash on Linux is terrible.
Flash on the Mac is an abomination.
Flash on Windows is fairly crappy, but at least when it works it's not the massive CPU hog it is on other platforms. When it works.
There are some very smart guys at Adobe, but I've yet to be convinced that they're actually allowed to do their job across most of the product range.
Are you truly that inept at troubleshooting a pc, that you wipe the entire fucking OS to fix minor problems? Please stop giving people advice. About anything. Ever. Ok?
Are you so inept at fixing a pc that you think wiping the entire OS is some sort of monumental task? Is troubleshooting for 3 hours better than wiping your OS clean in 30 minutes? (you have your home directory on a separate partition, right?)
She loves me: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0 She loves me not: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688BF
i think the iphone's lack of flash support is going to force more and more web developers to offer alternatives to flash or to drop flash altogether.
Running Slackware 12, with FF 2, and it works for me.. I watch a lot of youtube - it's never been a problem.
Interestingly, FF on my fedora box at work will hang randomly when I leave a flash site (especially Youtube) - it doesn't appear to be dependent upon the video or site, because I can re-visit the same one and have no problems.
I'd say it's a distro problem, not a flash problem.
In terms of Flash and YouTube there really are issues yet no one seems to care. Many, many people have issues with YouTube videos freezing after 2 seconds of initial play. There are tons of suggestions as to how to fix this but none seem to work 100% or all the time. I thought the de-select JAVA option for Firefox solved the video issue but it is not a 100% fix either. Given the popularity one would think YouTube, Adobe and FF people could come to a fix. Also, why isn't Adobe supporting Linux now that Microsoft is pushing their Silverlight platform.
I may be the only one here who finds this news. Although this is of course at least partially a symptom of my not caring about he iphone in general.
However, as my wife wants the iphone, I have to ask how this problem works. I thought most systems used flash for youtube - which leads me to the question of how does the iphone use youtube if it doesn't use flash?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
He even said it himself in his article: "It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system." Adobe's two biggest cash cows are Windows and Mac users. Why should anyone that earns such a lot of money and has close ties to the aforementioned companies be interested in supporting the Open Source community. As we all now, that's communist bullshit and kills the software industry. Right? Right? It's another typical example of how so called standards are used to limit the degree of freedom in a market and why big companies are so particularly bad for human evolution (I consider technological innovation and knowledge culture evolutionary traits).
Have some tcpdump or ngrep logs to show such behavior? Or maybe your tinfoil hat is too tight.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Probably the very low user penetration. It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system. I've been hearing that argument for years. I remember back in 1999 hearing how Linux would be ready for the desktop in 2001. Years have passed since then and it still isn't. The underlining problem is that Linux and its components create a system written by developers for developers, and it always will be. But the thing is, there's nothing wrong with that. The fun of linux is the fun of being able to tweak everything, and lets face it simple systems like Mac and Windows just aren't as fun in that way.
One in every three or four YouTube videos crashes the browser.
Of course the ideal solution would be for Adobe to fix Flash, but in the meantime you can use nspluginwrapper to prevent Firefox from crashing whenever Flash goes down. nspluginwrapper runs Flash in a separate child process from the web browser, and uses IPC to display the plugin's contents in your browser; it was originally created to allow people to use 32-bit plugins in 64-bit browsers, but this mechanism is also great for isolating the web browser from plugin crashes.
Another solution is to use Opera, which on Linux runs its plugins in an nspluginwrapper-like child process by default.
Are you so inept at fixing a pc that you think wiping the entire OS is some sort of monumental task? Is troubleshooting for 3 hours better than wiping your OS clean in 30 minutes? (you have your home directory on a separate partition, right?)
Thank you, finally someone with some sense. It's really really easy to fuck up a Linux installation if you are a twiddler, like say, add the wrong repository to your update manager and then have some beta packages installed whose version numbers are hard-coded into each other and disappear after a few hours. What fun.
Wiping windows is a pain but a necessity -everybody seems to have accepted that.
Wiping Linux is a breeze but you have to know how to properly do it to save time -fewer people seem to have gotten that far.
Separate Home partition ftw!
Custom protocols and standards wreck the web, which originally got large in part because of its inherent interoperability.
It's why we bothered to put things in HTML in the first place, instead of linking Gopher trees to LaTex and .doc files.
I have never liked Flash for this reason. It's a hog on Opera, and unstable as well on Firefox. It encourages the worst kind of contentless web site creation. Finally, it's a giant sieve of security holes and vulnerabilities.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
Flash is even broken on Windows and OSX
Maybe not as broken as you find it on Linux, but when it comes to sucking performance for no reason or doing really stupid things like cropping video when flipping to full screen video it has some rather hugh problems. (Multi-Monitors is something Adobe thinks people don't use for watching Flash Video apparently, cause it looks very untested.)
Sadly, Flash with Firefox is 10x worse than Flash with IE. After thinking I was going insane on a few new personal installs, I pulled techs to examine the Flash differences. Same sites, same Flash content, and inside Firefox it would bring the CPU to 100% and with IE not even scratch the CPU.
These are also not lemur porn quality sites, these are mainstream sites that have Flash based Ads or even MSNBC which has not moved to Silverlight.
In contrast, the new Silverlight is pretty, efficient and shiny in comparison on both Firefox and IE and even OS X. The NBC Olympic HD streaming it has been handling works better than even my Silverlight developer 'fans' expected, making Flash look problematic and more like an old dog.
Face it, anything consumer related is shit on Linux if it originated elsewhere.
Sure we have Amarok which owns Winamp but it started on Linux. Even Google, which is pretty pro Linux (compared to most) expect some stuff to be run under wine rather than giving us something native.
I think Adobe is just a bit backwards and lacking the right skills. We always get the latest version of Flash last and it's never as good. If they had any sense they'd treat Linux people better. Both Apple and MS are trying to eat Adobe's lunch. Adobe's paying customers are generally businesses which are more open to open source than consumers. Why not give Linux users premium software and port Creative Studio to Linux to, at the very least, teach MS and Apple to stop eating into their market. Plus, imo, Linux will keep growing on the business front as will its software so why risk allowing GIMP to eat up it's market share as well.
Flash isn't perfect full stop and, imo, there are better alternatives coming up, but Flash is huge and it would be nice to get some decent support for consuming and developing on Linux.
Thoroughly testing one platform is hard enough. Testing against each and every current version of every popular distro is a lot of regression tests.
The situation with Linux isn't horrible for open source software--the load of testing all those system permutations is theoretically distributed across the teams of all those distros.
For commercial software (and open source if we were completely honest), testing on loads of platforms is just a lot of time and energy that companies like Adobe don't really have to dedicate to such a small percentage of their potential customer base.
. Penguins Surely Ca
The original design of NetPhotoClasses.org (http://www.netphotoclasses.org/classes) used some Flash for displaying instructional presentations but after it didn't work as expected on either a new build of Firefox or IE 7 (worked on IE6, Microsoft told me it was my site... go figure) all Flash was removed and everything now comes out of php. The interesting thing with the Firefox problem was it failed dismally on both the Linux and Windows versions.
As we say in various MMOs, less crying, more doing something about it. I cannot code my way out of a plastic bag (outside of PHP scripting) and I know it. So I submit bug reports and the like as I find problems. Otherwise, I can't really complain, as I am not doing anything else to fix the problem.
You should be able to tweak everything and have Flash.
Linux should also be the dominant OS if people were intelligent but they're not.
Sadly computers are like cars. There is a small group that loves being able to have access to everything but most people rather worry about something boring and expect their computer to do their thinking for them. But that is flawed and will never work until computers are smarter than people and run their household for them.
Works fine for me. Get a better distribution.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The latest beta's have terrible crashing problems, but the primary crashes are currently being addressed on the bug tracker. wmode issues are also being resolved. This should put flash on linux in the same ballpark as flash on OS-X.
Of course we're pissed about it, but really, I think Adobe is already stepping up to the plate on this one.
Is that a good sports metaphor? I dunno. I don't do sports.
If you wish to try a recent beta without messing with your system, run the installer on the adobe site as a non-privileged user. It will install to your home directory, and can be removed by deleting a single file.
i.e, remove libflashsupport, use the latest flash 10 beta and create a /etc/asound.conf as described in bug 198453
I've not had any browser crashes since doing this, so cross fingers. This is probably a very common problem..
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5587712&postcount=472. This guy has for a long time been working on getting flash working perfectly in ubuntu 8.04 and following the linked guide makes it work perfectly for me.
your answer is no. the more you spout off the crazier you sound. have you personally read every line of code for every app on your system?
The flash player has an incredibly annoying date issue, that has been documented so adobe says it's not a bug ... but in fact you get different behaviour when transferring a date between client/server, something that is common when using flex you get different time fields (hour, date, ...) for the same timestamp. Imagine how annoying it gets when a user selects 1/1/2008 and you try to use that date for business logic on the server side and you get 12/31/2007 ... could lead to unexpected behaviour.
This is not timezone related but adobe doesn't really get that ...
Don't use flex for business apps, even if adobe tries to sell it to you, it's just isn't ready yet.
I've been using the Adobe flash plug in on an Ubuntu setup for quite a while now with no issues (apt-get). I've got a Slack10 lappy that also has no problems viewing the latest mind-numbing inanity that is YouTube. The only time I really encountered some strangeness was with the Minefield nightlies a few months back - the player would kneecap the browser pretty consistently (not totally unexpected considering the browser was in beta). Maybe it's not the player you're having a problem with Opie.
Flash works fine for me on Ubuntu Hardy 64.
The only problem is that flash can only use so many sound channels so if you open more then 20 flash files at the same time they stop working.
I have been using it without problem for months.
I am an Adobe Flex developer so if it didn't work it would be a serious issue for me.
Now if Adobe would just make a 64Bit Flexbuilder.
seriously who hasnt given old flash a throw or two?
remember when it was called futuresplash
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#History
back in the day we didnt have no old school
I watch a lot of videos on Youtube -- I can't confirm your numbers.
Even with more than 20 open tabs. Multiple simultaniously playing videos are possible.
I use the i386 variant of Ubuntu 8.04 hardy heron and the newest Firefox + oldbar + noscript + adblock plus + nukeanything e. + DownloadThemAll + DownloadHelper + Adblock Filterset.G Updater + Ubuntu Firefox Modifications + german language pack.
The home-directory is mounted over NFS but that doesn't affect stability either.
What I avoid like the pest are non-free _drivers_ -- this computer uses a matrox graphic card. Albeit double-size playback or something similar results in heavy cpu load.
I have a lot of crashes on different hardware + ati & nvidia restricted drivers.
(As a system administrator I take care of a lot of different servers and desktops.)
Regards.
I also hate how some pages do not detect that you have it at all. Instead of offering a "Click here to try the SWF file ANYWAY", they link you to adobe.
thedailyshow.com recently changed so that i can no longer see their videos =(
The guy you need to address this problem with is Tinic Uro over at http://www.kaourantin.net/
Real slashdotters use text browsers like Lynx. Graphical browsers are for sissies.
Works for me. â
I used to have the same problem and solved it in the following way:
When you first open Mozilla, browse to http://edition.cnn.com/video/ and play the first few seconds of the default video. For the duration of that browser process, Flash no longer causes the browser to segfault.
Don't ask me why, but this worked for me. The whole problem vanished completely when I upgraded from Slackware 10.1 to 12.1.
Adobe Flash has been pretty rock solid for me for the past two years or so, and it worked acceptably for the year before that (there were some sound issues back then). All three years I've been using it in a 64-bit Firefox on Gentoo. Currently it's Flash player 9.0.124.0 on Firefox 3.0.1. I watch YouTube videos almost every day as well as frequently using other flash video sites. I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed, whether I was watching a flash video or not.
I therefore call bullshit. You should try reinstalling Flash, Firefox, or your whole distro -- or perhaps switch to another distro. Flash on Linux works perfectly over here.
the CANNOT earn any money from Linux users ( there doesn't exist any for-sale software from Adobe for Linux, does there? ), and HAVE to increase their profits for their shareholders: therefore it is a *requirement* of their business that all Linux/FOSS access be broken.
Business Case (reason) for a Business, people!
*whine* *whine*
Flash is broken for FreeBSD. Been broken for years.
Why whine about Flash being broken? Stop showing support - don't use sites that have opted to use technology that lacks support for open source.
*blah blah stops adoption of Linux blah blah*
I've heard that for years. 1st it was the reliability. Then it was office suites. Then .... Yet every time whatever has 'stopped' adoption - there is not the 'expected uptick'. Stop worrying about 'what stops adoption' - because if Microsoft really feels threatened - the resulting actions (like a free Microsoft OS) will stop the fragmented GNU/Linux OS in its tracks.
I'm running Ubuntu that the teenager in the house uses all the time and watches Youtube videos all day. I just asked her if it crashes and she said she never has any problems except for sometimes it's slow.
Can I bum a sig?
Once Firefox 3.1 comes out and includes support for playback of Theora videos and Ogg audio... I hope there will be in influx of new content published (using the more simple tags) using Theora and Ogg. Hopefully that will cause some momentum and give Flash some competition. I realize that Flash is used for a lot more than just video and audio but it is the dominant thing Linux users care to use Flash for. Of course that isn't going to cause YouTube to switch everything over to Theora / Ogg but you have to start somewhere.
Scott Dowdle
www.MontanaLinux.Org
I have Flashblock installed with FF on my XP machine and after several years can count the number of "exceptional sites" - where Flash is allowed to load - on one hand. If a site requires Flash to present their content, find another site.
Personally, I care way more about fonts than Flash. On my Fedora 8 install if I run "rpm -qa | grep -i font" I see a lot of packages installed. Too many, considering I still think the fonts I see on my OOB Fedora 8 installation look like crap. And yes, I have done a fair amount of tweaking. They still look like shit. Especially on Firefox.
one in three or four would be really high in my experience.
Of course, of course, any proprietary monopoly would have issues, but the truth is that I'm happier with Flash as the ubiquitous video presenter than I was back in the day of .wmv everywhere.
Baby steps.
Ok. Adobe support for Linux, despite their claims otherwise, is flaky and always late. No news here. They failed to completly convince opinion leaders (read: Linux users) in the field of web developement that they are serious, and my comitment to open source flash projects has rather dimished than grown since MX 2004 Pro / Flash 7. Right now I'm earning 60k/year as a Flash9/ActionScript 3 developer and still I don't trust them farther than I can throw them. Adobemedia has been doing to much bullshitting about their commitment to the Linux camp, and consitently delivered late ever since I went all-out Flash with a larger RIA project when Flash 7 for Linux finally came out.
However, what you are describing most certainly is a Linux problem. Aside from playing video, Flash on youtube doesn't do much, and I've watched a lot of youtube videos with Linux and have had no problems at all doing it. And if you run into a site that uses lots of Flash and doesn't render correctly, chances are you've met with a bunch of idiots who are to freakin' dumb to build a truly x-plattform RIA in Flash. Despite them possibly claiming to the the RIA Kings of the Interweb. Like these people for instance. (Linux users with working Flash, please let me know in a reply if any of you can reach the Flashsite ... I'd like to know if they've caught on yet ...)
Developing in Flash requires lots of skill and often some old-school hacks for high performance applications such as this and a solid knowledge of the target client plattforms. For example, a particle system I'm working on/with buckles by 25% on WinXP when run under Firefox+Flash then if run under IE+Flash. And while it's nearly a no-brainer to watch out for those two or three showstoppers that can prevent a Flash App from running correctly on x86 Linux (correct Font embedding for instance), I have to admit that good Flash/AS developers are rare. You have to be firm in graphics, typography *and* programming and then you have to be open-minded enough (read: not have your head up your arse) to try out a semi-proprietary plattform like Flash. Rare ingredients indeed.
Bottom Lines:
1) You have a Linux problem, not a Flash problem.
2) Most Flashers are mediocre at best. Guess where all the Flash crap comes from? The one or other RIA not rendering in FF/Linux is for the same reason.
3) Yes, Adobe's commitment to Linux *still* hasn't reached the level it needs to convince opinion leaders.
4) Where the *f*ck* is an open source RIA plattform allready? Webrunner/Prism will take another decade or so, guessing from the speed in general, and animated SVG doesn't even exist. JavaFX has come further than any other attempt from Sun - which has me very suprised - but I wouldn't be suprised if they'd stop dead in their tracks once again. Until the sky falls and the rivers run red with blood and Sun finally gets it's RIA going, Flash will be exactly what opinion leaders in the field still reluctantly have to account to it: The most prevailent RIA-enabled zero-fuss deployment plattform on the planet. Apparently Adobe can still dick around for another 10 years, since nobody is really challenging them yet.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
On the Nokia Internet Tablets, N8x0.
Depends, is one trying to be productive or is one a hobbyist? I find that most of the time when I spend the time to troubleshoot the problem, I end up with some ideas as to how to avoid the problem the next time around, or how to fix it in minimal time when it does occur.
But in terms of productivity, unless it's a recurring problem, it probably is more productive to just reinstall the OS in those cases.
Well, that's assuming that one doesn't compile everything from scratch and lack backups of the packages from which to quickly reinstall them.
Don't you think it's more likely that the iphone will be forced to adopt flash, rather than an entirely new flash player being develop from scratch just to cater to a single mobile unit .. ?
You may like your iphone but it's not the end-all, be-all of mobile web delivery and eventually will be outdated just like everything else.
All it's going to take is a few high profile cell phones to offer flash compatibility and apple's hand will be forced. I'm convinced the only reason this hasn't happened yet is that once all the flash games are available online for free via cell phones nobody is going to be strong armed into paying $5 for tetris anymore ..etc
Regardless, it's inevitable that cell phones will start offering the flash player if you look at the trends. They are becoming more and more synonymous with traditional browsers and desktop functionality. And once that box is opened then all of the other companies will be forced to follow suite.
ease up on the guy, he's probably had way to many years on Windows. Heck, I hear this from regular Linux users myself and often it is rebooting the OS to "fix" a networking problem.
People just don't know how the systems work these days and magic is the only thing they know.
I have run across flash showing up in a few locations so this is probably what happened to this guy and unfortunately, he only knew a re-installation fixed his problems. Sad but a good example of how uninformed computer users are today.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
If they actually made Flash work properly on Linux what would be next? They might have to [gasp] make Photoshop work there.
Btw, if Flash works fine on OS/X, just how hard can Linux really be?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
twitter is back at it again, using multiple accounts to try to game the system and attack people who disagree with him.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=646675&cid=24610747
I've used Flash on many distros, both on x86 and x64 platforms. I've never had much of a problem with it. Gnash, on the other hand, is slow, doesn't adhere to the Flash specification, and I've never got it to work properly. (It's a bit like WINE was five years ago - absolute crap when displaying anything other than "Hello World".)
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Because there's no money to be made in porting it to Linux, that's why.
Adobe really irritates me with some of the strange seeming choices they make. Flash works fine on Solaris 10, both x68 & sparc, but Adobe hasn't updated Acrobat Reader for Solaris x86 since Acrobat 5, but the sparc version is up to date.
This signature is a waste of 42 characters
Facebook and Youtube are good fun but I don't see them as being important enough to make older PCs turn to machines that aren't even "web-ready".
LINUX is my only desktop and laptop OS running the GNOME desktop. I have *ZERO* problems with flash. Everything just works. I've never had a problem playing a YouTube video, my browser has never crashed on YouTube. Our corporate Intranet uses flash in many cases and always works.
Using "Common Sense" is being either to arrogant or to ignorant to ask people who know more about something than you.
Flash doesn't crash so often with a good audio driver. The main problem is the new PulseAudio and no update from adobe. With alsa it works like a charm.
Since firefox 3 I never had crashes due to flash movies like i had with firefox 1.5 or 2. Maybe you should try to upgrade ? Also flashblock helps at managing resources by starting the flash content only when you want to, this way avoiding resource consumption by various banners or ads. As about gnash, that's just a poor joke.
I see a number of arguements about how flash helps delivery websites with *rich* *dynamic* content. Why? I am not a proponent of keeping the web at v1.0 but I absolutely hate sites that are drenched in so much flash that you can't see anything but moving, dynamtic, useless junk. Other technologies allow much more usefull dynamic contect(this *AMP) where content can be dynamically loaded from a database and menus can be dynamic and flowing and work on almost every web browser without issue.
Consider that youtube is flash done right. flash is just a powerful COMPONENT of a webpage and not a webpage building platform. It has become a complete platform where the html is just used to load a bunch of flash up but those sites are essentially content free! and are just trying to be flashy!
that being said, if flash was not being pushed to be an entire platform for web contenct delivery, then it would not be so difficult to get flash working on all platforms. The constant evolution of flash is the problem. Flash is not getting better at doing anything that it is really good for, just getting more of the useless stuff. Evolution for the sake of evolution causes extinction!
"It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system."
It has occurred to me that for the past decade, every Linux user has thought his most recent personal itch was the one major entry barrier to Linux desktop domination, and they have all been completely wrong.
The major entry barrier to Linux desktop domination is that even if you're a hardcore Mac or Linux or BSD guy, Windows simply doesn't suck that much. In general, any reasonably competent computer user can sit down at a Windows machine and get his work done. He may have to go out foraging for the right tools, but they're out there, and they're readily accessible.
Meanwhile, there is a vast community of computer users who are NOT reasonably competent, and while they may not be particularly good at getting their work done on Windows, they are EVEN WORSE at getting it done on anything else.
When retarded people can use Linux, you might have a shot at desktop domination. Until then, don't bother.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
... will remain an utter failure. Developers decide that Flash and the like are the problem and decide that the user should go without or spend hours of trial and error to get it. Guess what, flash works great for me in Konqueror and fails miserably in FF. This has made me realize that Flash support is not the blame of Adobe, but because of unpredictable behaviour of linux on a given configuration.
Flash may or may not be evil closed source, it's as basic to the normal use of a computer as a sound- and video-driver (2nd failure on linux) or ubiquitous wireless detection (3rd failure on linux).
After years of Linux the only advance I see is continuous devotion to appearance instead of content and the blatant copying of evil closed-software packages.
My prediction: in 5 years there will be a large number of open-source flash-forks. None of them will work 100%. It'll be supported after the next generation of multimedia tools will flood your computer.
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
speaking for myself (using Ubuntu 8.04 32-bit) Flash has been working very stable after a few updates
I can't do anything with Gnash or swfdec so i have to put up with Flash 9. I tried Flash 7 but a lot of sites won't work with it.
Also, i can get a way better playback quality by playing the Flash file from /tmp with mplayer (no video or audio skipping).
And Flash is also _so_ annoying. It takes longer for pages to load, scrolling gets slower, distracting videos, obnoxious audio. . .
Flash is garbage. Flashblock is gold.
The original poster of this article is experiencing bugs with his or her distribution, *not* merely with Flash. There are several issues at work here.
a) Flash 10 RC is the first version to support "windowless mode" flash content that several sites use. Unfortunately, there is a bug in Firefox that causes "windowless mode" content to crash. It is not a bug caused by Adobe Flash; un fact, the newest version of swfdec (which also added support for "windowless mode" content) also causes Firefox to crash. This fix is due for release in Firefox 3.0.2 and a workaround is available for older releases already. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/239182
b) Ubuntu Hardy was the first release to integrate PulseAudio, but its default configuration can cause a lot of trouble for users. PulseAudio provides ALSA plugins that enable plain ALSA applications to work correctly with PulseAudio; these plugins are supposed to be enabled by default. Some (buggy) applications do not work correctly using these plugins, including Flash 9 and Audacity. Hardy was released without these plugin enabled, causing many audio mixing problems for users. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/198453
c) It appears the original poster is using the libflashsupport library, which is a workaround to enable PulseAudio support in Flash without the need for the ALSA plugins mentioned in point (b) to be enabled. There is a bug in Flash when using the libflashsupport API; closing and opening new flash streams will result in a crash (such as navigating from one Youtube page to another). See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/192888
d) Flash 10 has fixed its ALSA implementation, allowing it to work correctly with the PulseAudio ALSA plugins as mentioned in point (b) - this means that the (buggy) libflashsupport library is now redundant.
Note that all the above bugs contain links to the upstream issues when applicable. For those too lazy to follow the individual bugs, I have posted a guide to configure PulseAudio (and Flash 10) correctly for Ubuntu users, complete with testing packages. See: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578
The reason is, that even in 2008, most "Linux" people (or BSD, Solaris, Mac) dual boot into Windows just to they can use the few important (to them) things that don't quite work.
So there is no real imperative for things to change. Progress has been slow, and will continue to be so.
Stick Men
I installed 8.04 the other day on a Dell Dimension 1100 (not mine!) about a week ago and I've been watching Flash vids with default FF and Flash utils on both Youtube and Google Vids (longer bigger cuts) with no problem.
Wonder why such inconsistent results between all us users?
-Matt
This is another myth Linux advocates delude themselves with. Most people around my office (scientists, students, IT support, admin folks) NEVER think much about Linux, let along care/know whether Flash works on Linux. Saying Flash now works on Linux is just news to the 1% desktop market and will not make a dent on Linux desktop adoption. Versus the server side market - at least 50% running non-IIS - that is where Adobe pours its resource to make sure its Flex/ColdFusion server work. And what percentage of Linux developers are going to give up Java/PHP/RoR or contemplate buying Adobe Studio (if it ever come out for Linux) and start coding Action Script/CFML/Flex to help Adobe win the platform war? Call it what you will. It's just simple Adobe management decision. Lots of Windows/Mac users actually hates Flash, and it wouldn't made any difference to them (me included) whether Flash works when they choose a desktop. I wonder if the number of Flash haters is actually is greater than all the desktop Linux supporters? Games, however, is another matter, and that is an issue where Linux developers can actually make a difference and not rely on a 3rd party.
It's working on my setup: Ubuntu Hardy Heron, Firefox 3.0, Shockwave Flash 9.0 r124.
YouTube works great and I don't get any crashes.
The Standalone Flash Player works flawlessly on Wine, yet the Flash Player plugin for Linux Firefox just really really sucks. That means somewhere in the linux porting chain, someone is doing a really bad job at programming.
If you think Flash is the ONE THING preventing Linux from being accepted publicly, you're too much of a fanboy to realize how horribly wrong you are.
"It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system."
+1 Hilarious
ease up on the guy, he's probably had way to many years on Windows.
That's also the case, but I'm actually also a hobbyist and know my way around Linux pretty well. In fact, many time I'm in a hurry and don't even bother loading X: I do whatever I need in console mode and am done with it.
It just so happens that nowadays I work full time and go to night college, consequently having only a few hours per weekend to play around in my home box, a much different scenario than when I started figuring out Debian, back in 1997. Very pragmatic consequence: I prefer using those few hours doing useful or fun stuff rather than fixing obscure annoyances. Thus, if I can solve something in one hour by wiping sda1 and reinstalling the OS, my actual data and custom compiled software being well secured in sda3, sda4, a shelf of DVD-Rs and Amazon S3, that's exactly what I'll do.
Simply put, sometimes doing things "the right way" just isn't worth the effort.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Java FX should be out rather soon, and I think you can do most things as easy as in Flash, but also much more...
I am not aware of a time in the past where an earlier version of flash was more successful on Linux than the current version (which itself is unpredictable at best and terrible at worst). I think the only thing that has changed is that, much to our disdain, flash has become even more widespread on the web.
We've had this lousy product now for over 10 years, and it still is lousy. Unfortunately it has become an even more ubiquitous lousy product.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I am not a fan of Flash, however I have not seen any problems with Flash on Linux since they ended the enormous version lag that broken some sites when Windows hd flash 8 and Linux port stopped development at 7. Flash on Linux is a massive resource eater, has idiotic installation procedure, often has to be updated because of security bugs, however it has exactly the same problems on Windows. It is more crappy and unfixable than most Linux software, however this says more about the level of quality that is considered acceptable on Windows rather than about any deficiencies specific to a Linux port.
As for Youtube, why would a Linux user want to use their flash-based player? Install latest version of clive, mplayer and xclip, and run this script after selecting or copying Youtube URL:
#!/bin/sh
cd "$HOME"
cd Desktop 2>/dev/null
xterm -bg "#ffffff" -fg "#000000" -cr "#800000" -ah -fa "DejaVu Sans Mono" -fs 14 -g 80x6 -T "Video Download" \
-e sh -c \
'xclip -o | clive "--player=mplayer -fs %i" --play=src --mask=custom'
(assign it to some panel launcher or menu in your desktop environent).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
While some people use voice recognition software strictly for dictation, others use it to control their computers, specifically disabled people.
My brother is disabled and he says he has grown to hate flash. It oftens slows his computer down, causes crashes, and isn't accessible outside of manually navigating to its buttons unlike standard HTML which he can just say the name of the link to access.
I also do some web page design here and there and I always dissuade people from using flash as a solution. Sure, you can provide an awesome interface, but at the cost of processing power, bandwidth and broken accessibility, it hardly seems worth it. The goal of a page is to access information with everything else coming after in order of importance IMO.
Vote for this issue: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-114 Not only is it slow as death on a bunch of chipsets, but it crashes constantly. Very annoying.
...is the same reason behind the fact that after 15 years, Adobe has yet to deliver an application which can render PDF to the screen without crashing every few minutes and absorbing silly amounts of system resources. On any platform. Seriously guys, not every problem Linux has is due to the nefarious machinations of some incompetent megacorp. More often than not, it's simply due to the gross incompetence of some megacorp.
Seems like every time I see Safari crash, the backtrace of the crashed thread is in FlashEnforceLocalSecurity().
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I know its ancecdotal but, the orgininal Ask Slash dotters statement seems to be as well, flash works just fine on all the linux boxes I browse the web with.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Sounds like someone in the open source community should step up and start a project to replace flash and silver light for that matter. Mozilla are you listening?
The lastest Flash 10 release 3 works fine on my ubuntu/Opera installation with the exception of some youtube movies that give me a white box... I would definately love it if someone could create an open-source flash plugin that works though...
are better off given that many, many ads are now created in Flash and of course not having the plug-in means you don't have to see the annoying video ads. Of course, with the FF plug-in you can selectively turn Flash off on a site-by-site basis. I personally don't like Flash so I don't miss it.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Flash plugin from adobe works fine for me on firefof on ubuntu. Shockwave doesnt.
You get it from adobe! the package you install is just a script that downloads and install latest flash... Every not so often when adobe updates flash this script needs update as well..
I don't know if this is because of Flash 9 or my hardware....I just moved to Ubuntu full time with Hardy, on a stock Dell Inspiron 600m. It has onboard graphics, but I'm pretty sure flash videos worked fine back on XP. I don't get crashes, but most videos (youtube, etc.) can get a little choppy at some times. The audio is usually ok, though, I think.
I did enable all the compiz stuff, though. I wonder if I upgraded the RAM (only have 512MB currently), or tried the new v10 if it would be any better?
Last time I checked Vista was dead on arrival, Microsoft's marketing pronouncements not withstanding. HP recently announced that sure there are a lot of Vista preloaded machines in warehouses, but no, no one is actually getting them that way -- they are getting them "downgraded" to XP because nobody wants Vista.
Is that I have personally never experienced problems with flash, it was even easy to install it, and I have used ubuntu ever since breezy badger times. That's the problem and it is that the experiences are quite inconsistent, with a huge group of people always having issues.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Somewhat off topic, or in an overlapping corner of the topic -
I don't run Linux anymore, only so many hours in the day, but I do a lot of Actionscript widget coding for $$$. Flash has some memory leaks that range from annoying to deal breaker. I honestly like AS 3 as I don't know Java well enough to write one man dev team internet apps and AS lets me do that. but ... If Adobe doesn't solve garbage collection and soon AJAX or (new buzzword) starts looking a lot better for low end desktop / web application development.
Hey I'll sign up to an SVG / Javascript solution if one presents itself but I've been saying that for a while.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I'm on Ubuntu 8.04 on an AMD X2 6400+ and flash works perfectly for me. I use Firefox 3.0.1 and Flash 9.0 r124. Flash never crashes my browser and I've also never had a problem with You Tube videos. I've heard Flash 10 has some issues, so haven't installed it.
In Firefox, type "about:plugins" in the address bar and report back what it list as file name under "Shockwave Flash". It should show:
/home/{username}/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
Uninstall any other flash plugins you may have installed - they can conflict with each other.
The flash player VM is horribly broken in many ways.
We have been developing a couple huge applications based on Flash/Flex/AIR and we have run into a number of annoying issues.
For one the flash player will never fully release objects from memory. It's garbage collection cleans up about 25% of the references in memory, but there are very low-level event listeners in the VM itself that hold on to objects, and in-turn those objects have other listeners that hold on to other objects.
Our application starts out at about 80MB of memory usage (which in itself is bad enough) and within a few hours its well over 500MB.
Adobe ignores this and in some cases becomes horribly defensive about it.
Second annoyance is that run-time errors are never reported in the non-debug player. Flash will continue trying to execute the rest of the movie even if it has had a horrible error. To compound the issue AIR does not have a debug version of its runtime so when we receive errors from our clients we have very little go on because by the time the application manifests the error in some sort of visual fashion it might have been hundreds of commands back.
Flex/AIR will never take off unless they fix these issues. The framework is a joke and AIR leaks memory faster than the Titanic took on water.
"...It has occurred to me that $(SOME_PET_PEEVE_SOFTWARE_ISSUE_OF_USER_GROUP_XYZ) on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system..."
Your needs are vastly different than mine. Because you fail to understand this point you will never understand the "major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as..." is actually you .
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
I'm running Opera on the AMD64 port of Debian unstable and Flash works great for me. If you're having a problem, you're doing it wrong.
Maybe not
I believe the real reason why they are having difficulties porting Flash is that their code is crap, simply.
The developers were not well educated. Had the code been platform-independent, as any decent code should be, it should have been trivial to add support for any operating system.
The fact that it is not shows that their code is tightly coupled to OS-specific APIs if not worse.
To port to another operating system, you need to
- port your build system, or just use a cross-platform one in the first place
- port your abstractions of sound access, filesystem access, network access, screen drawing API (making it OpenGL-based makes things simple) and miscellaneous stuff
- run your test suite to make sure everything is all right
Choosing tools that are not environment-specific when possible, not making assumptions about the environment, writing layers of abstraction when relying on environment-specific tools is necessary, all of these are obvious best practices that should have been taught and well anchored in the mind of all software developers.
His reply was, "yeah me and everyone I know in this industry try to get the programmers to put as much flashy flash stuff up on our different marketing web sites and advertising banners as possible... and loving it! We won't stop."
Why won't they stop? Well, because people pay attention to the stuff, you can't help but be drawn to moving images vs. static content - it's how our brains are designed.
What surprises me, following on from this, is that doubleclick (or some other online Ad company) hasn't paid to implement flash properly on Linux to ensure that all the ads can be viewed on that platform.
I use Linux and the Adobe version of the Flash player and everything works fine. No youtube videos not working. Since the Adobe flash player is not open source and not free software many distributions do not use this flash player out of the box. They use open source flash players such as Gnash. Like I said, the Adobe player works fine, perhaps if people have less good experiences this is with open source implementations which are not quite up to date.
Use opensolaris it's flash player is awesome, there are other reasons to use it but this sure is a compelling one.
More posts that should be put in a distro-specific forum, instead of the slashdot front page. Im all for helping people, but some need to help themselves.
I never had any serious, regular problem, in the last year and a half, with Debian Etch or Any Ubuntu release since 6.10 (when i first used it) with flash. The oddball crash happens, but its nothing normal or that I can re-create (in epiphany browser or firefox)
With that, I link to "How to ask questions the smart way" or "christ, can you search first, then ask in the apporopriate place?" :
(...)
The post is just a bitch and moan. This is slashdot, news for nerds, etc. There have been useful, interesting "Ask Slashdot" posts, but this is not one of them.
You can't keep n00bs out of internet, that's a fact.
This problem has been a huge annoyance, but there is a way around in Arch Linux, there should be similar solutions for other distro's.
For the Arch Linux workaround, nspluginwrapper is used to get around the limitation with a whole bunch of 32bit libs. The full details are on the Arch Linux Wiki.
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_Flash_on_Arch64
cheers,
"It works for me".
To the techie (engineering manager, web admin etc) just sees this as more hard work.
The marketing/sales person sees this as revenue/business development opportunity.
This does not only apply to external companies, but also within a company. If you're a techie (chances you are if you're on /.) and you have an idea that might make the company money then don't try sell it to the engineering people (who will generally try to squash the idea) - rather tell the marketing people (who see it as a chance to make money).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I know lots of people will smile when reading this comment but I actually report issues to Adobe, especially alpha/beta testing Flash 10. They are NOT very communicative but I see some stuff I reported has been fixed. I am also on PowerPC (still) which MS overlords decided to drop support as early as Silverlight 2.
Another issue with closed source/large company software is, they can't include "crash reporter" so they don't actually know who crashes doing what. It is problem on OS X too but at least we send them to Apple, I don't know what Apple does with them though. For that part, also thank to paranoids and conspiracy theorists. They can obviously have "crash dump" code attached and next day, you would see "Adobe spies on their Linux users!!!" type of story.
Anyway, if you know a specific site triggering crash, you better report to Adobe. Linux is _very_ important to them in light of recent developments. If they didn't care, you wouldn't see Flash 10 beta shipped for Linux.
For "Real Networks" and "Adobe", realistic companies not spoiled like Microsoft, Linux support is passport to "devices" and somehow OSX/future iPhone. Don't think they don't care.
i'd really like to know what browser version, what extentions/add-ons if any, and what version of flash people are using. I'm seeing flash complaints everywhere, yet I've had zero problems with Gentoo, Suse and Ubuntu (all the latest and greatest), FF3.0, and Flash 9.
It seems to me, that for the most part, these technologies make websites slow, annoying, buggy, and browser incompatible.
The primary purpose of these technologies seems to be either advertisements, or looky-what-I-can-do.
I know this comment is just a joke, but Porn missed the flash video boat. They were mostly standardized on WMV until long after YouTube got popular.
Current versions of Flash have worked fine on Linux for well over a year. If you're still having trouble, your computer is broken in some other way that is affecting Flash.
Lots of stuff in Linux is broken, has been broken, and will continue to be broken as long as developers know how to spend a minute to fix their own, and simply move on to creating new and shiny stuff. They assume you know how to spend the same minute, but that's seldom the case. What you end up with is crapware, but by golly it'll do a lotta stuff, albeit poorly.
Firefox 3.1 is going to add Theora video and Vorbis music support for video and music HTML5 tags. The picture quality will probably be better than FLV (but worse than H264 in the short term, although work is being done to improve this.
Flash does dramatically more than video mind...
I watch YouTube videos all day, and I use Gentoo. Something is wrong with your PC.
how about a story about slashdot being broken for ie users? oh, that's right, cmdrdildo hates to be the target to truth.
It is very simple. They have absolutely no motivation either way, because they have a monopoly for certain things on the web. And because there is only one player (proprietary or not) it is also a gaping security hole. Millions of installs, monoculture (only one client), security nightmare. And the browser becomes the OS, because the apps are now net based.
We need other clients, and since no company seems to do it (like for example PDF where the Foxit PDF reader is a very good alternative that I recommend for speed and security) open source seems the way to go. And the open source client could even be compiled for Win32, Linux AMD64, OpenBSD, IPhone, ...
I would be willing to pay money for something like that. Does Gnash (or something similar) have a way to donate? Because I think lots of people might want an alternate client. Maybe they would even get enough money to fund a developer. Maybe Mozilla should be asked to lend a hand?
We've had plenty of those already.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Why does Flash on Linux suck? Because there's no free authoritative specification. That leaves only partial documentation (API documentation is not everything) and a closed source binary only reference implementation.
The lack of diversity of flash implementations means that even if you wrote down a good specification, if there were any difference between the implementation that everyone used and the specification, really the reference implementation would "win" the political value.
This is why projects like gnash are left to do a lot of black box analysis as a prerequisite for building a new implementation, and it'll always be a catch-up game.
And if anyone things flash on Linux is bad, try flash on FreeBSD... sheesh.
-bugg
I am a long time Linux and Ubuntu user. I had little problems with flash for many years. Occasionally a menu would sit behind an animation, but that was not much of an issue. Then with Ubuntu's switch to pulse audio the wheels fell off. Firefox crashing was a regular occurrence. I tried Opera and discovered that it would not crash, but when a flash error occurred it would display a white box and do nothing. Often all that was needed was a refresh. Not great, but better. Reading news groups pointed to pulse as the culprit. I have three Ubuntu and one Debian Lenny machines and they are all crash free, but the solution was a little complex. The Debian machine does not have pulse audio and uses flash 10 beta 2 and "just works". In Ubuntu I had to install flash 9 from non-free, then download flash ten beta 2 and unzip but not install. Then unistall libflashsupport through Synaptic. Then, as a super user, copy the libflashplayer.so from 10 beta to /usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/ and overwrite the old one.
Firefox now appears stable and YouTube has not crashed yet.
For Ubuntu this should be a high priority fix. All this talk about propriety software is meaningless to an end user who just wants to play on YouTube. Like it or not flash is everywhere on the Internet and if you can't use it then you either jump through hoops to fix it, or if you are a noobe you simply give up and go back to XP.
To use the Internet properly you must have a working Flash, Adobe have provided a Linux client. Now let us make sure it works on every distro in every instance.
My box runs ubuntu 8.04, it's a 64bit system and flash is working (in FF3). FF3 tells me I'm using a plugin called Shockwave Flash 9.0 r124. I never came across a flash application that wouldn't run. And I don't remember any fuss when installing the plugin. Hm.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
Flash has always been somewhat unstable, hence Jobs nixing it for the iphone.
Lets face it, linux is a miniscule market share with users who don't want to pay for software. Adobe is a software company. What is their motivation to invest in something with 0% return?
I could flame you for suggesting to replace a 5-year old proprietary format with a 10-year old proprietary format
QuickTime follows a published international standard. If your concern is patents, what non-proprietary format were you thinking of? Ogg Theora?
Adobe does have some interest in keeping Flash on Linux broken, or it should at least. Adobe doesn't make directly money from the flash player, but from Flash, Photoshop, Acrobat etc, which all don't really run on Linux that well.
The problem was that there was no open source atlernative to flash from the start. You do need flash for some things, and other than just video streaming. As long as people still keep using flash for whatever reason, there's still gonna be sites who use it for video streaming, music playback and other things, even if the html5 video tag gets adopted.
The best solution is to have an Open Source alternative to flash, and not only to the flash player. Here I think Java FX is a good initiative, I don't know what kind of success it will have, but it's the only way we can be rid of problems like the one Flash poses. It's not about the flash player being broken on Linux, it's about it being proprietary and closed source.
Flash is proprietary.
Gnash and haXe, which work with the same public SWF format as the proprietary Flash Player and Flex SDK, are free software.
(Yeah, I know about Moonlight -- how long till that gets hit with patents from Microsoft, though, if it starts to matter?)
Given that Microsoft helps make Moonlight, it would appear that Microsoft wholeheartedly licenses its patents to Moonlight. Key parts of Microsoft's contribution to Moonlight are under the MSPL, a GPLv3-compatible permissive free software license similar to the Apache license.
More posts that should be put in a distro-specific forum, instead of the slashdot front page.
If something affects all popular distributions of GNU/Linux, I don't see why that should keep it off the /. front page.
Theres no distro name, no kernel or browser type or version given, no way anyone can help him.
Would it work to have said something like "My customers have been able to reproduce the failures on both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, and on Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, and Linspire?
Like many other respondents here, I watch dozens of YouTube videos every week and I never have any problems viewing them. Given the error rate that you describe it sounds like you either have an old flash player or else something is misconfigured in your system.
-deane
Adobe doesn't care about Linux. It's nothing personal, they just don't.
Sig this!
I'm not trying to hide my bias - most of the work we do is in Actionscript.
But I agree as much as the next guy that making a typical website in Flash is stupid. So is unnecessary required video, low-contrast color schemes, gratuitous music, required Javascript for basic navigation, poor text-only / accessibility support, and many other things that are common on all together too many sites.
There's a bunch of reasons to use Flash, but the biggest one is that it lets you do something no other platform does - create rich, full featured, object oriented applications that just work with a wide installed user base, on a variety of platforms, with a minimum* of security risk to the user.
If you're only thinking Flash Video, you're thinking too small. Think "any application in the world that does not need direct hardware access or to maximize its access to computing resources" It runs over the web, it runs locally, and it runs the same.
Really, Flash shouldn't have this crown. Java applets should. But they don't, because of how that played out in the 90s. The behavior isn't consistent, and developing rich applications for it was tedious at best.
For the programmers reading, you don't want to develop apps in Flash, which is a super-glorified animation tool. But you want to develop in Adobe Flex, which is a wonderful tool with a for-pay IDE, but a free CLI compiler. The OUTPUT is a Flash swf, but the INPUT no longer has a binary animation file, and all of the layout supports inheritance. And the crossover is tremendous and seamless, so you can use whatever your animators/designers make in Flash in a blink.
To address some other points:
Even requiring a recent version of Flash, Flash does generally have a higher installed user base than any other single system. Obviously "HTML" per se has a higher base, but if you're doing anything modestly complex you have to break apart the major-different IE versions from everything else, and last I checked I believe Flash 9 has a higher installed base than any family of HTML rendering. I believe these stats were based on computers "active on the web" - so it doesn't count things that aren't hooked up to the internet currently, many of which presumably have old versions of IE.
Flash Player isn't as open and crossplatform as I'd like, but in general it's been getting better on both counts. Reading the comments of people who actually described there system, it seems like there's problems running Flash Player with 64bit browsers in Linux, and not with 32bit browsers...
*I didn't say NO security risk. But as platforms for running totally arbitrary third party code go, I don't know of anything that does a BETTER job.
Starting as early as 2002 Actionscript is an OOP language.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Separate Home partition ftw!
And do some verified backups in order to avoid fuckups!
It's Poetry! They should have hired a poet for system administration! Can't find words to describe...(floating down to my confortable bed)
So, Flash lovers, what, exactly, is flash good for
that cannot be done with industry standard
formats? (other than make money for Adobe)
Video? Use mpeg. There are several FLOSS
players for mpeg.
If your web site requires flash, many many people
will not be able to view your website.
Seriously - the next time you are about to post a rant about how great Linux is and how it's been 'ready for the desktop' for years now, and how it does everything you could ever want....
Remember that crap as simple as Flash doesn't work for crap.
Linux....just as broken and behind the times as it's ever been - but hey, it's free!
What surprises me, following on from this, is that doubleclick (or some other online Ad company) hasn't paid to implement flash properly on Linux to ensure that all the ads can be viewed on that platform.
Lotta good that would do. Like many other linux users I know, I have a bunch of *.doubleclick.com entries in my /etc/hosts file mapping those hosts to 127.0.0.1. When I spot another doubleclick add, I add another hostname to the list. Right now there are 40 of them.
But I don't see to many doubleclick flash ads, either, or anyone else's, because I've had flashblock installed in firefox for several years. To bad it doesn't work with all browsers; not supporting flashblock just persuades me not to use that browser.
Hmmm ... Maybe this is why I hadn't actually noticed that flashblock has problems on linux. Except that I have watched a bunch of youtube videos on my linux box, and I don't recall ever seeing it crash during one of them. Just to be sure, I just paused typing this, went to youtube, and played half a dozen videos on my new ubuntu 8.04 machine. It worked fine (after I unblocked yet another flash site for one of the videos ;-).
Just out of curiosity, is there some reliable way to demo the problem? I don't seem to be stumbling across one.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
For anyone who's wondering: the standard answer to the 64-bit question is that you're too lazy to port Adobe's 135,000+ line Tamarin project to 64-bit architecture. Apparently if you just go and do that, 64-bit versions of Flash player will instantly rain down from the sky.
So now you know. Be a good little user and get that done by noon won't you? Stop bothering Adobe with your silly questions.
I am surprised to hear about so many of my fellow linuxers having problems with flash (okay... so I don't get out so much).
I'm using Fedora 8 64 bit with Firefox 2 and have installed the adobe 32 flash player and the nspluginwrapper. It works great with no crashes, lockups or slowdowns.
The only problem I have is when I go to some of these local TV websites to see some of their "breaking video" The problem is that they tend to layer their "reports" in commercials and promos that you have to endure before you get to their (usually amateurish and brain dead) "feature". As we skip from commercial to commercial the whole thing grinds to a halt.... actually now that I think of it, that might actually be a blessing in disguise. Never mind.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought Adobe basically opened up the Flash API definitions, etc. Enabling anyone to port Flash to any device if they so choose.
If that's the case, why don't you get together with a few others and start building "OpenFlash" for Linux?
Yes we do...
And if you've only used sites featuring those technologies as ads. You really need to browse the web a bit more.
Or get out there and try using some web applications that don't feature JavaScript, Flash, etc.
They suck, they're slow, they're a pain in the but to use. Requiring 10 steps and page reloads for what could be a single page load.
sure, but *someone* can keep this crap off the front page. I mean they dont post dupes or anyth-- bah, nevermind
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
linux sux
This blog http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/ is written by one of the people working on the linux version of Flash and explains some stuff about working on Flash (somewhere in the archives is an explanation of why there is no 64 bit native Flash player yet IIRC)
The explanation is on the net somewhere. The crash is caused by a conflict in sound software attached to your distro. There is a cure but I can't recall the steps. You'll have to try the forums for your distro to get the cure.
From the HOWTO on the 1.0 version from the "C&C: generals" page you linked to:
4. Once the installation is done, find yourself a no-cd crack and replace the original game.dat and generals.exe with the cracked ones.
I don't consider a requirement of installing a no-cd crack as being good enough to say that a game runs in Wine (see this: "... some would advocate the use of illegally modified or "cracked" games, Wine does not support, advocate, or even view this as a solution").
However, it seems reasonable to consider the other games to be working under Wine — I haven't run Oblivion myself, but RA2 and Starcraft run fine (although I do occasionally have issues with RA2 on a slow computer).
Ask me about repetitive DNA
So there is no version of Flash that is open source then?
Actually, a month or two ago, Adobe started the Open Screen project. While this isn't an open source flash per-se, it does open up the chance for people to start working on a better port of Flash to Linux. So for anyone complaining about Linux on Flash: patches welcome.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
It is. It sucks. And its like global warming, it doesnt exist.
I had the same flashplayer problems with Mandriva 2008.1. YouTube videos constantly crashing in Firefox 3.0, etc. I uninstalled libflashsupport, which was automatically included in Mandriva, and installed the new flashplayer 10 beta. No more crashes at all. On my wife's laptop, all I did was uninstall libflashsupport, and left her Firefox 2.0 and flashplayer 9 intact, and it seemed to eliminate the crashing, as well. I, too, had almost given up on finding a solution. This definitely works on Mandriva, at least.
Didn't Adobe recently completely open all Flash specs needed to create an open source Flash player and creator? Or did I miss something in those announcements?
Firefox 3.0 and Adobe Flash plugin on Ubuntu 8.0. Actually it works better than on my XP machine, cause I can zoom in properly. There must be some hardware specific problems that some users are experiencing.
I'm not a Linux graybeard by any means. I installed Ubuntu back on July 4, and I can honestly say that I haven't booted into Windows in almost two weeks. I haven't needed or wanted to. (I spend most of my time playing with the LAMP stack.)
YouTube works fine, as does every other Flash site I visit. I had an issue the first time, did a GIS for a solution, did whatever it said, and I've been fine ever since. No browser crashes or anything, and this is 64 bit Linux. Was it as easy as it is in Windows? No. But it wasn't terribly hard, either.
What is humor if not pain tempered by time?
Why should a closed source company such as Adobe promote open source software such as Linux? It goes completely against its goals.
Just look at the software that gives Adobe its huge bucket-o-cash:
Flash MX (You know, for authoring)
Premiere
Photoshop
Linux users (including me) completely hate that closed source model. For the Adobe execs, supporting Linux would be like allowing the enemy to enter their territory, IMHO. So they support Windows, knowing that the more time people can't install Linux, they'll still depend on a proprietary Operating System, with its proprietary applications.
In other words, they scratch Microsoft's back, and Microsoft will scratch theirs.
Otherwise, I can't find a valid reason why they wouldn't support Linux. Laziness, perhaps? When you got practically 100% (Adobe) of the 95% (Windows) of the Market, why bother with the stupid complaints of people who will never buy your products, anyway?
Flash video works fine in Kubuntu 8.04. But you do have a point. Audio and 3D driver support is piss-poor in Linux.
Choices, choices. Choice is good! But trying to support every competing sound system is not the way to provide it. At last count, there were SEVEN different sound systems available on my system, and none of my applications supports more than two or three. If we ever want to see Linux become a target for commercial software development (read: games), then we need to standardize the available APIs. The leading distros each need to pick ONE sound system and bundle only applications that support that sound system. And may the best distro win.
...but I NEED it! The damn crap is everywhere. Once in a while I turn to Opera for two particular sites that still don't display well in Firefox. Much worse than that is having to turn to my box with that other OS just to properly display a couple of heavily Flash-laden sites that I visit frequently.
All audio video codecs I've encountered, pr0n sites (so I hear), and most of the games I've tried (under wine), run fine on Ubuntu-based Mint 5. Its just that damn POS Flash that an industry leader still can't (or won't) make work. Seriously, for me it is an annoyance and an inconvenience. For some friends and family whom I've introduced to linux, it is a barrier that keeps them bound to their crippled, legacy OS. I have to real computers, and a Flash machine, basically. Sad.
yes, there are tools for SVG: inkscape.org and both audio and video tags will be in SVG spec version 1.2
Using the wonderful slackbuild and compiled from source.
I also use flash on a Nokia n810 and haven't had an issue
YMMV
I use adblock with the filterset.g updater; hosts file loopbacks ... old-skool!
If Linux is gaining all this "market share" it's getting a substantial number of folks without the nous to block the ads nor apply fixes/hacks to get flash working.
Because if they don't, eventually the open source community will reverse engineer all their crap and put it out there for free without any involvement from them and they'll just be left sucking hind tit.
Thanks for bringing that to everyone's attention (I'm the author of the guide).
The instructions are a little shaky for 64bit users at the moment, though. Hardy's version of the user-land ALSA libraries are too old to function well with PulseAudio, and it's difficult to package updated 32bit libraries that already exist in the massive ia32-lib package.
Just look at the signs, Flash is broken on Linux, a x86_64 bit version of flash has taken 5+ years in the making, and the whole purpose of flash is to make little animations with bright lights to amuse an idiot into loving your website or for directing people to a product, who are not smart enough to use the Site Map. Flash is a bad technology, and quite frankly, adobe does not care about anyone intelligent enough to make decisions for themselves, be they Linux or x86_64...
Not running Flash smoothly isn't keeping Linux from going mainstream. Linux supporters are keeping Linux from overtaking Windows. When the Linux community at large drops their holier-than-thou attitude and puts forth the effort to create a Windows killer distro, Flash will be nothing more then a line of the checklist. Until then, Linux bigots - and Apple snobs - will sit on the sidelines while the rest of the world moves on.
It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system.
I've been hearing that argument for years. I remember back in 1999 hearing how Linux would be ready for the desktop in 2001. Years have passed since then and it still isn't.
Because flash still sucks! :-P
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
so we can test it, and of course 'give it some slashdot effect'.
What are you, delusional? Do you think anyone who's a non-geek even know what the Internet Archive or Creative Commons are? And why do you use the word "broken" so incorrectly? Flash and Silverlight work. When something doesn't work its broken. Something isn't broken just because you don't LIKE it.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Flash is mostly used to post spam and we the linux users are thanful for not having it in our computer.
Even veals have more autonomy!
I'm running linux/Ubuntu and watching youtube and other flash videos every day. And now, slashdot is telling me that in the real world, that does not happen. It is an amazing feeling I must tell you.
...proprietary "de-facto" standards are evil. Flash is a "standard" much too closely held by one company, and even if it caters to multiple platforms it insists on being the only developer of a closed client to support the data format and actively discourages community or other third party development, open OR closed.
Your wife isn't alone in suffering from unstable Flash on Windows XP. It isn't a problem with any particular version of the OS ot even the browser for that matter (flash performance on IE is also substandard in my opinion). The problam is that the developers responsible for ALL flash player development at Adobe vomit out the some pretty wretched, barely-beta-quality code.
I think there has to be some insistence on conformance to *real* standards by major players on the 'net. So much of what is on-line that uses Flash could be done with actual standards. It was quite the brain fart to come up with using flash player to transport video when a non-vendor-specific standard practice could've been picked with little additional effort. It annoys me that something like SVG or even a Java applet could've been used to show stock charts on Google finance and the like but instead we are stuck with some senile flash object.
I'm generally averse to government regulation, but I do think governments can play a role here: When awarding web development contract, make it a stipulation that properly vettted, vendor-independent standards must be used exclusevely, perhaps specifically mentioning that the use of flash player is completely banned until (if ever) the standard is made open. I hate to day it, but even MSFT's Siverlight is mmore open than Flash (at least it lets others make interoperable client software with Moonlight--not obly if they'd let a community-developed Moonlight client run on Windows to provide competition).
Perhaps large corporate users could set good examples too and ban flash from all external and internal web apps in their enterprise: our employer has a "reference client" on which such apps must run without the need to download dependencies from the 'net. If only that reference client did not contain the flash player...
There are a lot of complaints bout artsy-fartsy "web page artists" who love to load up pages with nothing but flash objects. Well, people are lazy by nature, and if you can wow a PHB with flaming, rotating logos and animated, fading, translucent menus most easily by using flash that is what they'll use. If only PHBs would grab sone sense ad see that the whole WWW is sick because of bandwidth hogging, unstable proprietary crap that adds literally zero REAL value to the web experience that other established technologies can't do just as well.
I'm glad someone has recognized this. I've been playing with Ubuntu for a couple of years (which surprises me that I didn't notice this sooner). A few weeks ago, I set up an old computer for my 5 year old to play Gcompris, Tuxpaint, etc. on (because my wife bought him an old crappy imac (like G3) that runs like molasses). Well, I got it all setup and ready to go with the above mentioned programs installed. He loves all the flash stuff on pbskids.org so i went there to bookmark it. Almost none of the flash stuff worked. I was pissed. I quickly installed Windows XP and everyone was happy...until my old Dell monitor died...which really sux because I sold a spare CRT monitor to a college student for $20 about a month before. Now all he has is the crappy old imac. Maybe this is all good because now he doesn't even use the computer.
That's it, you don't need anything more.
Yep, The lack of Windows-quality flash support in Linux is the single worst thing about the operating system.
...well, in a way anyways. 64-bit Windows users must have a 32-bit browser installed and running under the WoW Win32 emulator. Under 64-bit Linux you can use nspluginwrapper as an alternative to a 32-bit browser.
A Flash crash using a 32-bit browser may crash the entire browser (on Wndows, perhaps even the whole WoW process). On Linux, nspluginwrapper, apart from encapsulating the 32-bit exceution within the realm of the plugin instead of the browesr, seems to run the plugin in a separate process (or a well-isolated thread at least). So, that nasty Flash object that crashes in Windows or any other 32 bit browser simply kills the flash object--you get a blank square but at least you can continue browsing relatively uninterrupted. A page reload, or at worst a restart of the browser at your leisure, will restore the flash operation.
I've heard that you can even use nspluginwrapper on 32-bit Liux--even if you don't need it for compatibility it will add stability.
Poor Windows users have to suffer with browser crashes as nspluginwrapper doesn't seem to be available (and of course it wouldn't work at all with IE anyways, if that is your browser preference).
FYI, flash was designed, developed and continues to be maintained by a dozen stoned chimpanzees. For some unspecified "technical design" reasons they insist that migration to 64 bit is exremely challenging--so much so that Adobe's "TechNote" about it has said "Adobe is working on Flash Player support for 64-bit platforms as part of our ongoing commitment to the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player. We have not yet announced timing or release dates." for at least THREE YEARS now.
I might add that these stoned chimps only convene to do Flash player development part time, when they aren't busy trying to finish Duke Nukem Forever. I suspect that 64-bit flash release will be shortly after release of their main preoccupation.
Adobe is obviously no friend of Linux.
Flash is abysmal on Linux, this is true. However, I find Firefox in general to be sluggish and less stable and more of a memory hog on Linux than in Windows, so Flash isn't alone.
Adobe has never made a version of Photoshop for Linux, even though, most likely it would only require a couple of code changes that their staff could probably handle easily.
Adobe does not like Open Source. They want to sell their proprietary software, and I get the feeling they think ANY FOSS is bad for them, and honestly they are probably right. I'm looking forward to the day when The Gimp and moonlight completely bury flash and photoshop.
Let them rot in hell, along with MS, Creative, and all the other corporations that are so feverishly and fiendishly trying to hold onto their markets and fight FOSS tooth and nail.
I for one am happy to do 90% of what I need to do in the GIMP anyway. For the other 10%, Photoshop works well in enough in XP under Virtualbox, and then I just close that VM away back into the bliss of freedom and more efficient FOSS living.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
.... and if you think I paid $500 for Photoshop, or $100 for Windows XP, you are deluding yourself in the extreme. I actively loathe having to use either, ever, and certainly would not pay for the experience. Further, I would much rather have the cracked versions of either than the stock retail ones which are always slow, buggy, and full of DRM.
I'm a big fan of TinyXP, rather than stock Windows, and in particular it is VERY snappy under Virtualbox. If you haven't tried it out, install Virtualbox, and give it a whirl. Faster, smaller, cleaner, and easier than any other stock Windows install, by several orders of magnitude.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
You mean like invading other countries?
(Sorry, just saw some remarks from G.W. Bush, C. Rize and J. McCain about Russia invading Georgia and could not resist.
BTW I'm sorry for what's happening in Georgia but at the end I think I know shit about what's really happening there and I know only slightly more about what happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968. But given that, how did the US got rid of Hussein? And in which century?)
hany
Because in usual open source mentality Flash is seen as evil and viral which is complete nonsense. But hey you pay the price for stupidity.
Known epic Slashdot troll, crapflooder and shill.
die Flash, please die! kthxbai!
so say we all
Lotta good that would do. Like many other linux users I know, I have a bunch of *.doubleclick.com entries in my /etc/hosts file mapping those hosts to 127.0.0.1. When I spot another doubleclick add, I add another hostname to the list. Right now there are 40 of them.
Hotnames?
I prefer overriding the doubleclick.net domain itself in named.conf, referring it to a zone-file with only an SOA record. Anything asking for a host under doubleclick.net gets a NXDOMAIN answer.
"As far as I can tell, Microsoft have acted in remarkably good faith in terms of Silverlight."
Now replace Silverlight with OS/2
Or Word format compatability.
Or XML formats.
and passing on the logs/site.
This will help them find out where Gnash is not working and fix it (if possible: it is likely that in some cases, the code is relying on Flash bugs).
Which is why it's "only" a 1.2MB install.
Read earlier: iPods don't have flash but extract the video direct without flash. Therefore the 1.2MB install isn't needed: you only get video off it if you install a 10MB codec pack as part of (Quicktime/WMP/MPlayer/...). So that's
11.2MB for flash + codecs
vs
10MB for codecs
Hm. Which is smaller...
Kubuntu + Firefox 3 work with youtube just fine. The only thing I don't have compared to XP + Firefox is flash blocker. But, I didn't really try to find it
As a vegetarian I am not sure how exactly that argument is supposed to sail, but I'll bite. I don't go to restaurants that sell burgers, period. Likely the worst thing you do against the environment is eat meat and the worst thing you can do to the Internet is support, develop, or use Flash. It is proprietary, not handicap accessible, and adds no value to the website that uses it. If you are talking about using Flash as a video delivery tool, maybe you have an argument, but even that is questionable.
I've been pretty disappointed with flash on linux from version 7 through most of the 10 betas, but the latest 10 release candidate (out for a week or so) has actually been stable and fairly speedy.
The main thing I'm looking forward to is Speex encoding on the client; death to NellyMoser Asao!
Canvas anyone?
It works in most major browsers and does not require plugins. (see HTML5 spec)
For what its worth, I struggled for months (in windows XP) to get flash to play in firefox or IE. Specifically, as the original poster commented, I couldn't play half of the videos in youtube.
After nothing else worked, i tried disabling my norton firewall. Like magic, after months of failure, flash started working. Even more mysteriously, it continued to work AFTER I re-enabled the firewall.
I have no explanation, but in general it does seem like flash/adobe support is deteriorating. For example, while trying to trouble-shoot this flash issue a lot of the links were to adobe pdf files on adobe's support site (or possibly dynamically generated pdf). Many of these links failed to load, caused the PDF plugin to crash, or worked very slowly.
As for silverlight, I don't really care if microsoft is evil, as long as it works. Yes, I'm a troll. Yes, I think mono is really cool.
I had the same exact problem with and old hacked Linux distro. I went through every docs and forums over the Internet about Adobe Flash, uninstalled and reinstalled serveral times different browsers, but nothing really worked. It is actually still not doing it. I found it out when I installed another distribution (Debian) on the same hdd. It runs Iceweasel by default, so i just tried installing Flash and it worked just fine, never crashed. What happened was the old distro never detected the graphic card on my chipset, when Debian did ok. You need to have the right driver for your graphics, or it will hardly work... Just take a look at it. Good luck.
If your name is Anonymous Coward, don't bother replying. I already guess how smart you are.
i dont know what problems you have.
i use both firefox 3.0.1 & opera 9.51 and never had the adobe flash player (non-free) crash on me.
i actually have more problems in windows with the latest flash for windows. it regularly gives me an error because there are too many open flash sessions (note: flash sessions, not flash windows) i can open 3-4 webpages, and if i then go to a youtube clip i will get a "too many flash sessions" error, which you can just click ignore - but if i can just ignore it, why does it bother to STOP ALL BROWSING to tell me?
dell 1150, ubuntu 8.04.1
There worse : Flash on *BSD.
FreeBSD only has an obsolete Flash 7 (and still as unstable as nitroglycerine, try it with KDE4 Konqueror, it does nothing but eat 100% cpu).
OpenBSD can only run Flash through a browser running Linux emulation, ie. Opera and nothing else.
Not sure about DragonFly and NetBSD, but it's probably the same.
{{.sig}}
Finding the packages (libflashsupport and the one that bridges 32bit plugins into a 64bit browser) was more painful than it needed to be due to Ubuntu's "Don't use that proprietary code, try this shitty broken alternative" philosophy... but Flash actually does work just fine by simply installing the packages.
I had this running on one of my computers and Flash was working fine once I pointed the software to the correct file to use when it needed it. It ran You Tube as well without problem... I was using Spring 2008.1 Power Pack for this.
It has occurred to me that problems with Flash on non-Windows systems are the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Flash as a viable web framework. No matter how stably, smoothly, efficiently, and correctly it runs under Windows, the public will continue to view it as second-rate if Flash keeps crashing or does not work completely on Linux, FreeBSD, Symbian, Google Android.
I'm sure it is too late for anyone to read my comment but...
Other than being a pain to install on linux (and it has to be reinstalled every time you upgrade your browser), Flash 9 works fine.
The real problem is that there is no linux version of Shockwave. So i can't play most "flash" games b/c they actually use Shockwave.
Adobe still hasn't released a native Flash Client for Vista x64 and as such I still can't play Flash vids on my Vista Media Center. Should tell you how crappy Adobe development is right there. I'm just surprised there's no 64-bit browser embedded universal player that'll take care of flash, quicktime, and all that stuff so there's only one plugin to update..
Adobe is a publically-traded company. They exist to make a profit for their shareholders. Why on earth would they waste resources making a fully-functional version of Flash available for a platform whose main raison d'etre is to be "free"? There's no revenue there. There's no chance for them to return value to their shareholders. Sure, it makes a lot of FOSS-heads happy. That and $2.50 will buy you a cup of coffee.
I run linux--Suse 9.3 and I don't have problems with YouTube videos and you don't give a lot of info. What flavor/version are running? What's your cache size? Do you ever empty the damn thing? In other words, is the player the problem?
I would lie if I said, that this made me switch, and I definitely understand, that this is NOT the fault of the BRILLIANT group of people developing GPL apps and Linux itself.
However I remember this flash crap was one of the final ones that made me switch to OSX. The other one was X drivers and a wide-screen issue that caused my wide screen to 'shrink back' to 4:3 after every screen save.
Then again, I am not an OSX commercial, I am just saying that after almost 14 years of Linux usage I had to switch, as I spent more time fixing little stupid things instead of working. Then again, I am still using it on servers very happily, it is just the desktop where I retired it.
Argh ,,, BTW I am a web (among many other things) developer, and that FF crash and flash thing was getting on my nerves. At the end I constantly had to have a windows machine running FF and IE to check the sites I was working on.
Just my 2c
Macromedia is used for many educational program.
Without Macromedia support, Linux is very hard to enter the education world.
I've been using Ubuntu and Debian on few machines for months. I use Firefox, and Flash. I haven't noticed any problems, so I wonder how big this problem is? Until I read this, Flash support certainly didn't come to mind as a problem for Linux on the desktop.
...then they better get their Flash stuff together. More-and-more rapid e-learning solutions (the vast majority, I'd say) are delivered via Flash technologies. Sure, Flash gets a bad rap for the stupid blinky ads, but don't overlook the value of Flash as an Interactive Multimedia training solution. Software simulations, boring page-turning HR training, customer-service "role"-based training...mostly all done with some sort of Flash based rapid e-learning tool, such as Articulate or Captivate. Anytime a customer comes to us for deliverable e-learning, our first question is "can your run Flash, because if you can't, it's gonna cost you a lot more".
Is there an app that is truly essential to the everyday net user and/or developer that is written in Flash? A video player (as big as youtube might be) is but an applet that serves only video. Sure, there're some really good UI and games written in Flash, but they are non-essential. That is, I can live without them. And ads: I really can do without them too.
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
Isn't this a great situation for a startup to take on?
Windows XP-64 has been out for over 3 years, and Adobe STILL hasn't ported Flash over to it so that it works with the 64-bit native version of IE 7.
The only way you can watch a Flash movie under XP-64 is with the 32-bit Firefox under XP-64. What the hell is the holdup? (And yep, I've sent Adobe repeated emails on this -- no response.)
To all those out there who decry flash as a threat to the internet, etc etc
I am currently developing a kiosk style application using Flash. This is the type of app that would be overkill to develop in a standard language using OpenGL or a Game engine for graphics and yet still one which requires better graphic support than is capable using html and javascript.
It needs to be able to stream video and audio, needs animation, needs an http stack to communicate with the streaming server and needs logic to make it interactive rather than just a demo.
Sure I could host it on a Windows PC but since it will be deployed on hundreds of thousands of devices that would be cost prohibitive.
So what I'm trying to say is that not all Flash applications are built to annoy you. This one is being built to entertain you while you are 30,000 ft in the air and 6+ hours from your destination.
So if you want to have a great in flight experience... support Flash on Linux.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
The whole story is very embarassing, true. My recommendation is to overwork the plugin structure of the web browsers, so that a plugin crash does not necessarily crash the browser. And when such a plugin crash happens, simply outline it in a browser page, e.g. "The Plugin 'Adobe Flash Player' has crashed" or something the like. This would outline, what actually happened, and who is to blame.
from my laptop:
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_I_banned_flash.png
It works for my with Ubuntu and Gentoo "out of the box" _
Perhaps they're doing it on purpose, but to harm Linux for the sake of harming Linux; rather to harm Linux in order to avoid its wider acceptance and, as a result, their future need to develop software for three platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux). On the other hand, perhaps if it were easier to code for Linux, more commercial software would be made for it which doesn't suck so badly. On the other (other) hand, perhaps Linux works correctly, which is why that program crashes, whereas Windows is so buggy that whatever would cause it to crash just silently goes and overwrites stuff in memory, which isn't noticed at all because there are so many bugs and viruses affecting Windows that crashes are written off as "oh, I need a new computer" by idiot lusers who don't know that by reinstalling Windows, it will be as if they got a new computer, but without spending the money. Use nLite to customize your Windows installation disc by altering all of Microsoft's defaults to their opposite (for example, DO show file extensions, DO NOT show animations, etc). By switching every option in Windows to its opposite, you actually get a pretty decent operating system. Disclaimer: I use a Mac and run Ubuntu and a homebrew LFS system in VMware. No need for Windows anymore. Between Mac OS X and Linux, you can do anything. Even watch Flash crap in YouTube in one window while executing buildroot in your LFS system in another window while figuring out why Samba isn't working quite the way you want it to in Ubuntu in yet another window. With all these "windows" open, you'd think this is Mac OS X Vista. Which is what will happen when Apple buys out Microsoft in a few years. Or Mac OS XII Bronco, which is what will happen when OS 12 versions are named after horses after OJ Simpson buys a 51% share in the company.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Look how narrowminded a linux user actually is... thinking that a broken flashplayer is one of the only things holding people back on Linux.. yeah right.. Also you must think, what's in it for Adobe for creating a linuxplayer? (I must admit that it shouldn't be a big problem if there is already a player out to fix at least on a case by case base, even with only one programmer on the job).
I had the same beef as the poser of the article, but found it had more to do with how Flash worked with pulseaudio (which is apparently not compatible with flash, yet). Switching the sound system to ALSA fixed pretty much all the issues. Flash still excessive processing power, but at least it doesn't crash everytime I watch something on youtube.
Guess we have our answer...
I'm using Ubuntu 7.10 with Adobe Flash Version 9, and I never have any problem - none whatsoever.
When I had to install the flash plugin for the first time, firefox just redirected me to the adobe site for the download and it was easy to install.
I never have any problem viewing youtube etc..
I thought we have Java Media Framework already. Let's start the drive to replace all these proprietary madness with an open source one instead! Yeah, it might be more crash-prone, but it's open source! Somebody will get it fixed sooner or later!
I use Adobe Flash in GNU/Linux and it works FINE!!!
The killer-app for Flash these days is video playback, a la YouTube. This is obviously a bit ridiculous given that every OS has a native video playback plugin, but predictable given that they all have *different* native video playback plugins.
The .flv format (and the codecs it wraps--see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flv) is now the universal video format, because it works (in theory) in any browser with Flash.
What we need, then, is a FOSS plug-in (cross-platform, cross browser) that can simply play back .flv objects. The code to do that exists in the FFMPEG project and/or the VLC project. If I had a spare million dollars, I would totally fund it.
Most of what is wrong with the web could be trivially fixed if every browser started randomly offsetting the position of each element it renders by one pixel either up, down, left, or right. Any Javascript APIs should deny that the element has been offset.
Since Microsoft pays Novell to produce Moonlight, perhaps Adobe should sponsor Gnash
Flash mostly works for me ( Ubuntu Hardy Heron ), but I occasionally see spontaneous browser crashes when watching videos on hulu.com. There's also this wierd thing (I think it's a Firefox 3 compatibility issue because I didn't have this problem until Ubuntu upgraded FF2 to FF3) where when I try to enter Full Screen mode in their video player, and it actually does go fullscreen for about 1 second, then automatically 'collapses' back to non-fullscreen viewing mode (where it's embedded in the web page).
Neither are major problems, but are minor irritants.
As a FreeBSD user, I don't get proprietary closed-source Flash anyway. Boo hoo. Frankly, it makes the intertubes seem a lot more intelligent without it. I love the hypocrisy of the Linux movement: one year you hate Flash because it's proprietary, the next year you love it because Macromedia gave you a Linux binary. Now it's "broken" so you whine.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
it lets you do something no other platform does
Except bog-standard HTML, but shh, don't point out that the emporer has no clothes.
create rich, full featured, object oriented applications that just work with a wide installed user base, on a variety of platforms, with a minimum* of security risk to the user
Unless you use Linux or any other platform that Adobe deems less worthy, then you are SOL. Yeah, there is a half-assed plugin, but it crashes most browsers and STILL doesn't support 64 bit version of Linux, let alone FreeBSD, etc.
I don't really see the problem about flash in Linux. It works fine as a plugin for Firefox on Ubuntu and even Fedora. The fact that flash won't run on "advanced" linux distros isn't really a problem, since new converts to Linux won't exactly make a beeline for Slackware anyway.
I use Flash 10 on AMD64 with Ubuntu 8.04 and it works fine. I used the nspluginwrapper to get it working under 64bit Firefox. I never tried it with Youtube much, but I could watch hours of video on hulu.com without any crashes at 480i resolution and in full screen mode.
I remember in the late nineties websites used to stream porn using mpeg and you can always download the file. It's not like flash is the only option, just the current fad.
Because if they don't, eventually the open source community will reverse engineer all their crap and put it out there for free without any involvement from them and they'll just be left sucking hind tit.
Like the Gimp, wow. Thousands of Adobe users are migrating to it. Right.</sarcasm>
Well to be fair, Flash used to do a lot less and once upon a time (maybe 5-6 years ago) it was very feasible to combine SVG and a little Javascript to get a similar experience to what Flash was used for.
Actually it wasn't possible because when Flash was that simple, nothing reliably supported SVG except for a fairly klunky plugin provided by Adobe, ironically enough, which let you kind of use SVG as long as you were happy to present it inside a rectangular box after the user had gone through an ugly plugin installation process, and probably only on Windows PCs (from memory). Back around that time I remember a lot of people complaining about the lack of reliable SVG support, because the majority of stuff that was done in Flash (primarily irritating banner ads) could have been done much more nicely and standards compliantly using SVG and a little Javascript.
People who claim this now are probably continuing the same kinds of arguments from years like 2002. Since then, however, Adobe's made changes to later versions of Flash which has made it much more of an application development platform that goes far beyond everything for which SVG was intended.
I've never had any problem with Flash in OpenSUSE, I can only guess that the problem is with other distros. That said I think the OpenSUSE team tweak flash to make sure it does work
Because it's proprietary. Duh.
The web was never meant for applications. Applications are per definition not part of the web, and recognising this, there are much better tools available for the purpose.
Actually, flash does work in 64-bit Linux, in a sad, hacked, bastardized sort of way.
For those using Ubuntu, check out "nspluginwrapper"
My flash is working on both 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu versions (feisty/hardy), as well as on an older 32-bit Debian machine. Both 2.x (Debian/Ubuntu) and 3.x versions of firefox (Ubuntu).
On the Debian box it seemed to have issues at times. On Ubuntu the only consistent issue I've really had is that sometimes when the browser screws up the "nspluginwrapper" (used to run 32-bit flash on 64-bit firefox) doesn't die when the browser is killed.
CPU consumption doesn't seem bad either. At least on my older P4 laptop I'm still able to run full-screen youtube stuff, with the only lag being due to slow internet. CPU usage is within tolerable limits, with the only times it gets crazy being due to some weird-ass ads likely doing things they shouldn't (to be fair, I've had runaway JavaScripts do the same).
Seems to me that flash support has actually worked a little better recently. My biggest complain would be that Adobe seems to have a serious case of cranial-rectal-inversion in regards to 64-bit support... as the architecture has been around more than long enough to make way to having native 64-bit browser support (sans extra wrappers)
Flash crashes on Windows and you expect the Linux version to work? Give me a break. As to the rest of the discussion, I don't mind Flash being used for video playback (ie YouTube), but requiring Flash to view the whole site is just plain dumb. Good way to alienate customers who don't live in places with broadband which contrary to what the FCC says is a rather large area.
Because I think he's dead on. One thing that silverlight has going for it is that it is easier to code for because you can use the tools that any monkey can use. Doesn't mean the code will be well structured or easy to maintain, or that it will scale, but that lots of little monkeys will do it, and with that army of monkeys, something compelling will come out and tip the scale toward silverlight. Besides, scalability in a browser probably doesn't matter at all. I think adding yet another stupid plugin into the browser wars is a bad idea, (especially when there is no support for ALL platforms and browsers) but that doesn't mean this won't happen to us, just like IE did.
a) The web wasn't meant to be anything other than a document exchange protocol.
b) The internet was meant only to be a strategic back-up communications system.
c) The web/internet is never meant to be anything other than it's users want it to be.
d) Your comment was the dumbest thing posted on August 19th.
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Computers by the way were never meant for applications. They were meant for calculations. Just happened to be some intelligent person decided they could do more than just calculations.
Computers were meant for business and military use. They were never intended to be personal.
Computers never meant to run graphics and to do 3D imagery.
***
Can we have a much more stupid comment than that....lastly, people want applications that can communicate and work on the web. Therefore, the web is meant for applications.
I'm sorry if you're locked into desktop development and fail to realize that we're moving to a mobile computing environment. But you better get with the program.
I haven't owned a desktop in nearly 6 yrs. I wager in 20 yrs I won't even own a laptop anymore. Just a mobile computer device like a iPhone on steroids. And if I need extra processing I'll tap into a cloud.
...quite how little the real world cares about Linux on the desktop
If Linux was that popular, or that sensible an option then Flash would be working PERFECTLY in under a week, as it it, it would appear nobody who matters, cares.
Burn.
By the way, dispite what people say, and at least one makes sure they tell me every fucking day, if you replace Average Joe's Windows machine with Ubuntu, he wont go three months without doing all of the below:
A) Breaking it.
B) Hating it.
C) Missing thousands of Windows features.
Linux is NOT ready for the desktop, at the present rate it will NEVER be ready. You heard, NEVER. The people who swan around claiming that we're all prejudiced and Ubuntu is AS USER FRIENDLY as Windows are simply deluding themselves.
This should hurt, Apple took a Unix, and in 2 years create one of the most intuative, user friendly OSs around today.
The Linux community have been going strong for over 15 years and have produce a VERY VERY good server OS, and a Deskop OS held together with scotch tape, blutack and string.
By the way, I'm a Windows user.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Why does flash suck, period. Before I get flamed, I have a valid reason. Point in case: http:mycokerewards.com Go to that site and watch it eat your machine alive! Fucking turd-burglars stealing cycles from my box! For all the cash Coke has, you would think could come up with something better then that monstrosity!
...share, and Adobe doesn't give a flying fuck. And shouldn't.
+++OK ATH
Why don't you just use Windows or get a Mac?