Flash in the pan

As regular readers of this blog know, a few months ago we switched to using Linux on our office systems. We're happy with the relative immunity to viruses and malware, and with not having eventually to upgrade to the appalling Windows Vista, but almost daily I find examples of how the Linux environment is under-developed or plain amateurish compared to Windows. Geeks who trumpet that Linux is superior to Windows just don't live in the real world. It's all too easy to see how many people who are tempted into trying Linux on their desktop eventually give up in frustration and go back to Windows.

The latest example is when, after the upgrade to the BBC website, whenever I tried to watch a video clip Firefox started complaining that it "Cannot play media. You do not have the correct version of the flash player." It helpfully presented a link to download the latest version, which I did. I then installed it. After restarting Firefox the same message appeared.

Eventually I found the time to investigate the problem. The Flash installer had put the new libflashplayer.so in /usr/lib/flash-plugin . I needed to move it from there to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, where the old libflashplayer.so was located. But I should not have had to. It should have installed automatically in the correct location in the first place. Under Windows it would have done so. Until the folks who develop Linux address issues like this - which may be trivial to those "in the know" but are potential show-stoppers to most people who are not computer geeks, Linux can never be considered a serious competitor to Windows.

« Continuous backup | Home | Convivial host »