Does Flash suck or not?
As a long time Ubuntu user (my first version was Feisty Fawn, I think… That’s over 3 years ago), one of my biggest issues has been Flash. If you use Windows, you might wonder why, but if you use another OS, like Mac OS or any Linux distribution, you know the problem.
In the beginning days of YouTube, when you wanted to see a video ‘fullscreen’, the video just opened in a new, bigger window instead of doing like it does now. That update was very handy, but for the users of Linux and Mac that update came MONTHS later – Windows got it a long time before us.
Another thing is the speed and resources it uses on a Linux and Mac machine: it’s very slow. Try doing some Farmville on it, you’ll throw your PC out in a few minutes. And another issue I have with Flash on Ubuntu is that it uses another standard font than it has on Windows, which renders certain movies or animations unreadable on Linux (or certain games). That really sucks.
An even worse thing is, there isn’t a native AMD64 (64 bit version) of Flash for Linux, so we have to use a back way to get it. And that’s even SLOWER!
So, to be honest, I’m glad there is something like HTML5 video, but I don’t think it’ll replace Flash completely, because Flash is a handy thing, but it’s being abused for advertising goals. That’s why my favorite Firefox add-on is FlashBlock..
I’d like a good version of Flash though which runs properly on Linux. It’s not that we don’t want it that much… We got a decent Java, we got decent browsers (the same as on Windows, mostly)… but no Flash…
Adobe, you’ve got work to do.