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Oh joy oh market share... never mind usage share, because it doesn't appear in market figures. :-)

By the way, I'm using FreeBSD on the desktop exclusively since version 4.0 without any problems. Needless to say that "Flash" doesn't matter to me.

That's alright if Adobe didn't care because the market share is tiny, they're a company after all. But they promised they would release it, and they even showcased a development version in an IT fair.

Of course you could live without Flash, that would mean no video and no navigation for many web sites. But you could also live without a computer. My swimming teacher doesn't have a computer, and he doesn't even have an email address either. He doesn't miss it.

Oh, and yes, BSD is used as a desktop system by...FreeBSD users themselves, PC-BSD and DesktopBSD users. And maybe more...

If waiting for Flash on BSD is a deal breaker for you, then perhaps you've misunderstood FreeBSD's target audience.

While the main market for BSD users is the server there are many people that do use and would like to use it on the desktop and like it or not more and more sites are using flash. I personally look forward to Gnash being 100% flash compatible but right now that isn't the case.

"If waiting for Flash on BSD is a deal breaker for you, then perhaps you've misunderstood FreeBSD's target audience."

How is the "target audience" for BSD any different than the target audience for Solaris, which has a supported 64 bit Flash Player readily available? Or are you implying that BSD isn't meant to be run on the desktop, in which case I respectfully disagree, as I have been doing so for ten years (I'm sure users of PCBSD would disagree as well).

If I'm a hardcore system administrator, does it mean I'm not supposed to access the web site of my company supplier that uses Flash for its navigation bar? Should I be satisfied with a dual-boot to access those Flash sites? (No, I'm not going to send a rant letter to valuable customers because they use Flash) What about online videos? Am I not supposed to watch them in the first place?

When did Adobe ever promise that?
Even if they did, waiting for Adobe to deliver on their promises is like waiting for world peace--it's a nice hope, but very unlikely to ever happen.

When did Adobe ever promise that?
Even if they did, waiting for Adobe to deliver on their promises is like waiting for world peace--it's a nice hope, but very unlikely to ever happen.

We all remember when Flash was developed for Linux and all comments requested FreeBSD version of it was blatantly deleted. They just ignored *BSD or just didn't want to code for OpenSound- they wanted Flash for ALSA shit (I guess their coder was/is plain GNU/Linux fanboy).

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/

Pardon my ignorance, but what's wrong with linux compatibility & Flash for Linux?

Flash works fine on Ubuntu for me, so why wouldn't it work well enough on FreeBSD?

Or is there a version problem?

I hope you do appreciate that BSD and Linux are not the same kernels and that the executable formats and APIs differ, which is why FreeBSD has its Linux compatibility layer, which in turn makes Flash run on FreeBSD albeit not natively, which is what the discussion is all about.

Basically a FreeBSD user couldn't care less if Flash works *great* on Ubuntu as this does nothing for the situation on the FreeBSD side of the fence.

FreeBSD and Flash is the same as Linux and Shockwave.

The way to get Shockwave to run on Linux is to install Wine, Windows Firefox, and the shockwave plugin.

For FreeBSD that entails running the Linux compatibility layer, Linux Firefox, and the Linux Flash plugin. Frankly, the experience is miserable, and I had stability problems with it.

It's unstable and causes a lot of problems (take a look at the FreeBSD forum and here: http://www.jail.se/software/freebsd/)



Yes, it works great on Ubuntu, but not on *BSD.

Unfortunately I don't see things changing given the uncooperative nature of Adobe towards non-Windows operating systems. When they do support non-Windows operating systems you find that the quality is so poor that you'd wish the plugin never existed. Adobe's problem is basically the fact that they've never actually cared for their customers through the realisation that there is no money to be made off the plugin and thus they should fully document it.

So far the documentation provided to developers is absolutely pathetic and lacking huge details which they claim is under this hocus-pocus 'intellectual property'. I call it hocus-pocus because when ever a company really wants to get something done - they're quite happy to sort out all the issues and fast track the process.

For me, the problem I have with FreeBSD is the lack of support for Intel wireless chipsets or where support exists it lacks support for WPA; although FreeBSD now does have HAL I do think that the developers should have developed a superior alternative given the nature of how HAL detects hardware changes - polling every device over and over again resulting the CPU never going into low power state and thus using up more battery power. Then again, a replacement for HAL is more of something that should be tackled via freedesktop rather than a specific distribution or *NIX/*BSD operating system.

Edited 2009-05-04 13:08 UTC

WPI driver aka Intel 3945 works like a charme plus WPA/WPA2. Of course you don't have any luck with newest chipsets, but there is at least comming support for 4965AGN (aka lwn driver) in current (FreeBSD 8). So it's just a matter of time.

FreeBSD has a working, properly developed device notification framework in devd and devfs. Things have been working great without any need for hald. Just check the dmesg output after plugging things in and removing them. (You may need to edit devd.conf for some strange devices.)

The problem is that Linux doesn't have anything like this in the kernel, so they've developed hald to do it in userspace (which is fine). Unfortunately, the problem is that too many other big software frameworks/projects (like X.org) has started using hald as a reference and coding directly to/for it, bringing in forced dependencies on hald and d-bus.

Too many developers, nowadays, are coding for Linux, on Linux, with no thought about anything but Linux, and adding all kinds of extra layers to support Linux. Portability is going down the tubes.



What would be really nice is if hald became a compat layer that used the native device notification methods for the OS it is running on. Then it could OS-native methods on each OS (separate backends) and provide a uniform access-method on top (frontend).

You can run nspluginwrapper, with Linux Flash Player 9, and have working Flash running inside native Mozilla Firefox. Works quite well.

It's a pity, though, that the Adobe Flash Player 10 for FreeBSD that was shown as a pre-alpha a couple of months ago hasn't materialised as a real release.

Well, while I do agree Flash for Linux + compat mode sucks, what it sucks more is Flash at all. Almost 99% of sites using Flash suck and they don't give an alternative for those who don't want (or can) run this stupid piece of software.

Actually the only site I really care to visit and that it uses Flash is YouTube, altought they suck even more because they can use a free codec and they don't.

Just as an example: http://www.philips.com

A simple and well designed site with only few errors using the W3C validator. I'm tired of looking an ever growing sites with white rectangles asking for plug-ins.

That is done to make sites inaccessible, especially for disabled (read: blind) users. It's intended. You can carefully code, so that if "Flash" is not available, content is presented in a non-restricted way.



Then the tool youtobe-dl (from FreeBSD's ports collection) is for you. It downloads from "YouTube" and leaves a .flv file on your disk that you can play with mplayer. You can use mencoder to convert it into a more convenient format, Ogg/Theora, MPEG, or AVI. Or everything else that exists.



No "serious web developer" uses validation today. They know everything better, read: their authoring tools do. Those tools don't output HTML, they output crap.

Can you imagine what would happen if a web browser would include a W3C validator, and if it's not HTML, wouldn't display anything? Almost no web sites would exist anymore. :-)

And for "Flash": What would you think if simple images, pictures, in simple and common formats, such as JPG, GIF and PNG, would require you to install a proprietary plugin that is available only for some selected operating systems? A plugin that seems to hook so deeply into the OS that it's nearly impossible to create on your platform? I know that "Flash" is more complicated than an animated GIF, but in most cases, it is used where in the past an animated GIF was used! Used to annoy users, to distract attention, to nag, nag and nag - while occupying system resources and making everything slower. Today's user, still, consider "Flash" as essential as support for graphics in their browser.

The day I can use "Flash" as any JPG image, built-in in my browser with the option to SWITCH IT OFF, I will review my opinion. But today, "Flash" is of NO interest to me, so I keep my system clean from this annoyance. (I tried "Flash" in the past, but found it so useless I deleted it from the system again.)



Install Opera, it won't ask. :-)

(Sad development: In the past, you could right-click on a plug-in to bring up a context menu, allowing some things like "copy target address"; this isn't possible anymore, now it asks for a plug-in.)