This is Adobe problem. Flash for Linux is broke. They released buggy software. Period.

@Krisse: I think, the main reason that Linux\OSS is not so consumer-friendly in general, is just the (diminutive) amount of Linux\OSS developers who care about 'consumer-friendliness' in the same sense as you are describing.

Most of them probably just want to scratch their personal\own organization's itch in the first place which they don't need the 'userfriendliness' in the solution. It's apparent that the OSS projects with better alignment to such 'consumer-friendliness' usually has a commercial backing\relation of some sort with a by-product of the 'community version'.

I mean, there's really no such thing as a free lunch, right?

PS: Also... any effort to package the programs to be more user-friendly can also be construed as 'DUMBING THINGS DOWN', which may hurt the developer's street cred

Yeah, look at Gnome (which i love) - too often accused of dumbing things down and not providing enough options.

Then there is Pidgin, which i hate... Not having the option to close a window with Esc or to close automatically on send is a serious flaw in my eyes. I don't want hunderds of windows to get in my way. Too bad there's no good ICQ client for Gnome at all. Maybe Empathy will grow up to be one.

You'll never be able to make the purists happy. Why? Egos.

We live in civilized society, not tribalism. Windows is the former, Linux is the latter. Living in Linux is like living on a small reservation in the middle of this Wal-mart driven society that doesn't give 2 craps about FOSS-- they just want their goodies. So no matter how popular Linux gets, it's gonna bump up against that wall of commercialism/consumerism that its hardcore adherents despise... and while that wall may get compressed a little, it's not coming down.

As long as there's a profit to be made in software, proprietary goodies will exist, and *pure* Linux will be consigned to the reservation-- UNLESS the Linux tribe does one thing: beat capitalists at their own game. Create websites utilizing SVG and/or other open technologies that do what Flash and others do, but even better. And where SVG (et al) comes up short, start pulling the tribe together to lobby W3 to get it in gear. Problem is, I don't think egos will allow it. Egos are what's kept Linux on the reservation up to this point, and I don't see that changing.

heh, about pidgin:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?.../04/30/1822237

forking pidgin over automated size change of the input area?!

That is precisely an example of developer's ego.

And it's very interesting that in this sense an opensource program can be more restricting, when the developer don't listen to the user (no reason or $$ can change his mind).

the freedom to fork is always there. kinda like, if you dont like the available product, make your own. now, if that level of ego was presented by the flash crew, this would be a whole different ball game, as one basically had to bend over and take it...

I am surprised that Gnash has not been mentioned here
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
http://www.gnashdev.org/
http://www.getgnash.org/

Is this not a viable option? I haven't tried it myself yet as I only came across it a few days ago and my Linux setups are in a state of broken/experimental.

It has, at least twice, though not by name. Thanks for the links!

To test this hypothesis, buy a $300 computer, with one of those cheap everything-on-the-motherboard chipsets. Go and make two partitions on a hard drive. Install XP SP2 on one and Ubuntu on the other one. See which operating system recognizes the most hardware.

I'll give you a lollipop if XP even installs drivers for the ethernet hardware. If you don't have that, you can't get on the 'net. And if you can't get on the 'net, you'd better have a driver disk, otherwise, you're dead in the water.

In general, Ubuntu (even older versions, say, Dapper) will give you all the drivers you need to get on the net and get your system up and running fairly well. Sure, not all hardware comes with an install disk with Linux drivers on it, but a surprising amount of hardware does, these days.

By the way, anyone think we can get gnash working for the tablet? That would give us some more flexibility re: flash.