There are things I dislike about Ubuntu Linux, like the inability to customize during installation and the silly orange theme, but I had always thought that Ubuntu was the very best representative from the Linux world for mere mortals. Alas, Ubuntu has failed to live up to this expectation of “everything just works” in a big way. Ever since Adobe’s release of Flash 9.0 update 3 (9.0.115.0) codename “Moviestar” on December 4th, it has been impossible to install Flash through conventional means like the Add/Remove panel, Firefox’s plugin installer, or Synaptic.
Flash is one of the essential applications that every normal computer user must have nowadays. For a typical computer user to be unable to install Flash for a month (and counting) on a major operating system is frankly ludicrous. I’ve always scoffed at those who claim that “every Linux distribution sucks; *insert my favorite distro* just sucks less.” But this time, I can’t help but agree. (For the record, Ubuntu is not my favorite, but it is the easiest to install and use and my distro of choice at the office.)
Read more about this Flash bug here.
P.S. In my eyes, Mozilla Firefox is still the lone shining jewel in the arena of open-source software for end-users. Everything really “just works” and when problems arise, like the recent regressions, they get fixed in a hurry and pushed out with a fool-proof automatic update mechanism. All hail the Mozilla wizards.
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(Apologies for the lack of updates; I’ve been busy playing with this Gentoo web server amongst other things.)
