Am I the only one needing Flash for other stuff than Youtube?
Let's hypothesize.
It's easy to say "just avoid all that then", but that's handicapping yourself considerably and certainly not something that will attract new users nor keep old ones. Some University classes are conducted entirely in Adobe Connect (certain courses at the Lule? University of Technology, for one). Perhaps your job necessitates being able to hold voice/video conferences with shared whiteboard/presentation slides. There's a limit to the lengths I want to go to stick to Linux, and having to change employment or quit my studies certainly cross that. I'm knowledgeable enough to install Windows on a virtual machine, but for that I need a legal copy. The cheapest W7 Home Premium I can find here in Sweden is priced at $150, which isn't just pocket/leisure money amounts to everyone. By this point most people will already have said "fsck that, I knew Linux was just a toy OS, why didn't I listen to ${VENDOR}'s propaganda" and reformatted, or simply bought a new computer if they don't have the expertise.
I don't like it anymore than you do but Flash is too ubiquitous and widely adopted for me to rationally opt out from installing it, even if I ideologically want to. The current (amd64) Linux Flash works very well and I'd hate to see it just go downhill from here.
Hopefully smarter minds than mine will share this itch and scratch it for me.
Let's hypothesize.
- Assume, for the sake of the argument, that the upcoming versions of Flash will contain a critical feature that our dead-but-maintained version won't have, making ours essentially useless. Even now most of all rich web content can be done with a combination of javascript, html5 and other established protocols like rtsp -- but do you think the people providing rich web services will care a single whit if Flash is no longer available on some "obscure" non-OSX non-iOS non-Windows platform? It's usually a better business decision short-term to stick with what you know rather than move to the new, and with Flash you can pretty much do anything. Long-term it's obviously better to distance yourself from a vendor lock-in, but technically-aware developers rarely get to make the decisions.
- As for skipping Flash completely, what about services like streaming (TV, game tournaments, stuff like justin.tv)? Flash games and animations? Video-on-demand? Conference solutions like Adobe Connect? Random menu elements implemented in Flash? Poorly-designed websites written *entirely* in Flash?
It's easy to say "just avoid all that then", but that's handicapping yourself considerably and certainly not something that will attract new users nor keep old ones. Some University classes are conducted entirely in Adobe Connect (certain courses at the Lule? University of Technology, for one). Perhaps your job necessitates being able to hold voice/video conferences with shared whiteboard/presentation slides. There's a limit to the lengths I want to go to stick to Linux, and having to change employment or quit my studies certainly cross that. I'm knowledgeable enough to install Windows on a virtual machine, but for that I need a legal copy. The cheapest W7 Home Premium I can find here in Sweden is priced at $150, which isn't just pocket/leisure money amounts to everyone. By this point most people will already have said "fsck that, I knew Linux was just a toy OS, why didn't I listen to ${VENDOR}'s propaganda" and reformatted, or simply bought a new computer if they don't have the expertise.
I don't like it anymore than you do but Flash is too ubiquitous and widely adopted for me to rationally opt out from installing it, even if I ideologically want to. The current (amd64) Linux Flash works very well and I'd hate to see it just go downhill from here.
Hopefully smarter minds than mine will share this itch and scratch it for me.
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