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Comment by giardini | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, Intel. The year of the Linux desktop will never arrive until I can watch Youtube videos with the goddam Flash player (or anything else) in Linux.

Signed,

- No-flash Giardini who cannot watch Youtube videos on his Linux box.

Sorry, for an Internet user, life w/o Youtube is like being a blind man with a white cane.

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Flash works just fine on Linux. Even out of the box, on many distributions.

And those would be?

well, a lot of youtube videos do work in html5 mode. just visit http://youtube.com/html5 and join the trial.

I've done that. Doesn't work for most of the Youtube videos I want to view.

BTW why the downvoting? I'm simply stating the facts here: most Youtube and Flash videos can't be viewed on Linux, period. It's been true for several years now and sucks bananas.

If you've got a Linux distribution that allows display of more than 80% of Youtube and Flash videos then please tell me what it is. Otherwise don't be buttsore and downvote me simply because I'm stating an unpleasant truth.

Pick any distribution, any browser, and even pick which flash implementation to install (including Adobe's). Flash has worked fine on Linux for about a decade.

Ubuntu, Opera, any Flash version - fail.

Ubuntu, Firefox, any Flash version - fail.

Ubuntu, Chrome, any Flash version - fail.

Haven't tried Opera, but Ubuntu with Firefox and Chrome work perfectly well with flash for me. It's not a general issue that affects everyone; it's a problem with your setup.

Flash was mostly working fine in Ubuntu I think even 4-5 years ago.

For ubuntu, try the ubuntu-restricted-extras [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu-restricted-extras

I haven't tried playing 80% of videos on YouTube (ain't nobody got time for that), but of the videos I've tried to watch, all of them have played just fine (with a few buffering/[quality settings refusing to stick] issues which I've experienced equally on Windows boxen). Videos on other sites seem to work most of the time, especially if I temporarily disable AdBlockPlus.

Distros: Fedora and Gentoo.

Flash is dying. Let's have it die with Windows.

1) Sure, yeah, any day now. Yet Flash is ubiquitous and Youtube uses Flash for most of the video I view.

2) I see no evidence of Windows dying either.

Flash has been "dying" for nearly two years now yet looks pretty damn healthy from here ( and I still can't watch Youtube on Linux). It's absolute rubbish to use an OS w/o access to Youtube and other (usually Flash) video sites.

I run Windows on a second machine just for Youtube/Flash but I'm about to abandon Linux due to the clumsiness of this arrangement.

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