As an avid Ubuntu user (obviously, desktop Linux), few clarifications on how Adobe runtimes worked, until recently, at least:
- player plugin - There was a flash-player-nonfree in the Debian (and Ubuntu) PPAs, that one would normally install if using Firefox, Opera, Seamonkey or any similar browser on those distros. These are official version Adobe provided to those distros. Chrome used to recognize that plugin, but could also install one of it's own. In fact, I'm running a debug player in Chrome and release player in Firefox. Flash player, especially on 64 bit Linux has severe problems with stability (it got better lately, but better means it crashes once or twice a day instead of once or twice an hour). Besides stability, the rendering leaves a lot to wish for... - projector - very few people have used that, probably only developers like myself, who use Linux for day to day work. It's hard to believe it was ever used for other purposes. Maybe on embedded, kiosk-style machines, but I've not seen that either. - AIR - there has never been a 64-bit version of the runtime for Linux. Installing the 32-bit version of the runtime on a 64-bit distro was not particularly painful, but it required you to have two copies of libc and some other core utilities, that, normally, you wouldn't want to duplicate. Given that there was no AIR installer for Linux (you'd have to move files, create links, add records to the environmental variables - all on your own), I would imagine that this wasn't used much... I only saw 3 projects made in AIR that, actually, respected some Linux specifics / were used on Linux at all - all of them dead or semi-dead by now. (Minibuilder, Moonshine project). Flash player is extremely unfriendly to an average Linux user in that the only argument it takes on command line is -version (starting from version 10-something! it wasn't always like that) :) So even simple tasks like automatically positioning the projector are quite challenging... Adobe never provided development runtimes for Linux through a centralized repositories! This means, again, you could never install the debug player, like you would, for example, install a development version of httpd or PHP or Eclipse or whatever other project. You had to download an archive from Adobe site and figure out on your own where to extract that / what links you may need and so on. There were times when there was also an installer for debug player plugin bundled with that archive, but that never worked out of the box on popular distros, you could maybe use the install script as a reference to try to understand what the author was trying to accomplish. There was an enthusiastic person on Yahoo Flex mailing list who tried to provide a repository with the debugger, but the initiative didn't last long. As a side note, Flash player running in Wine (a WinAPI simulator) performs on par, or even better then "native" Linux player... In spite of the above facts, the support for Linux matters. Linux is the platform of choice for good programmers (hey, that's me! oh well...). If you used it for a while for development, you can't go back to Windows or Mac OS, or you would sneak in Cygwin, bring your favorite distro on a disc-on-key drive and work from it :) It's not because it's written by Torvalds and Stallman, it's because it's like a lego, and is highly customizable, which makes it much more comfortable then anything else. (So, this means that FreeBSD qualifies just the same - I don't mean in particular GNU/Linux, but any system built on the similar principle). So, while there's not much market share for Linux, it's absolutely worth the effort. Well, let me illustrate this differently. Recently, I decided I want to learn Haskell. I used stackoverflow.com site for a while to know what the dynamics of the site are. I'm usually only checking out the [flash] and [lisp] tags though. I've asked a question about Haskell's printf function - something probably newbish, and in an hour I've got about 10 replies and they were actually very in-depth, with examples and explanation etc. I often times come across explicitly wrong answers in the [flash] section, or very low-quality answers, that may actually hinder you more then help, or get you accustomed to an ill-suggested practice. Now, there's been an old joke about the 26'th mysterious Haskell programmer, an anonymous who'd post a complimenting comment whenever there was an article on Haskell released. Yet Haskell community was so small, they actually knew each other by name, and couldn't figure out who's posting those comments. And, with all that, they managed to write couple of good programs... Similarly, the Linux Flash community is very-very small, but if you stop providing support to them, you probably loose more then just few freaks :) Maybe it's hard to see this immediately, but innovations don't come from the corporative grounds. Corporations may be faithful supporters and source of income, but they are the exact opposite of innovation, because, obviously, they try to do less work, and iff innovation is imminent, they will update. So, reducing Linux support is like reducing the allocations to R&D. You may argue that there weren't good results so far - but read above, the support was very poor. Well, at least a self-respecting language would have provided an editing mode for Emacs! :D
