linux + flash = FAIL

wesley · 21 Jun 2009 at 09:36

hi guys

every linux distro i tried, any websites with small flash always make my laptop CPU very very ill

ubuntu, linux mint, fedora 10 and PClinuxOS does that on FF and opera.

but on xp, it's perfect.

why?

Illusion · 21 Jun 2009 at 09:55

Never noticed this myself, what CPU is in your laptop?

EYEREX · 21 Jun 2009 at 10:26

What card do you have Nvidia or ATI

vidda · 21 Jun 2009 at 11:21

I don't think flash is GPU accelerated in Linux at the moment.

yashiro · 21 Jun 2009 at 13:22

Flash isn't really accelerated on any platform.
As for why it sucks, Adobe can't code.

Your best solution is to enable the CPU scaling applet and clamp your CPU frequency to about 50% instead of using the usual on-demand CPU scaler. Flash will still work but it won't peg your fans out all the time.

tntcoder · 21 Jun 2009 at 13:27

If Adobes version is giving you issues, then maybe give the open source clone Gnash a look: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

It does sound like it could be hardware related though in your case.

wesley · 21 Jun 2009 at 14:05

rock XCT 2.0ghz, 1gb ram, nvidia 7800GTX

the whole point is flash is running perfectly on xp, no matter which broswer i use

pingwing · 21 Jun 2009 at 14:09

Humm are you using 32bit or 64bit linux? 64bit flash is shockingly bad! (never worked for me) but 32bit does work resonably well(ish).

wesley · 21 Jun 2009 at 14:12

32bit, my cpu doesnt support 64bit

BigglesPiP · 21 Jun 2009 at 15:04

What CPU? 2.0GHz means nothing these days.

The basic reason I suspect is because Flash is not open source. This means the only people working on a Linux version are a small group at Adobe. And TBH, they're either idiots or there's like three of them.

.walls · 21 Jun 2009 at 15:09

wesley said:
the whole point is flash is running perfectly on xp, no matter which broswer i use

As others have said - this isn't a linux problem, it's the fact that Adobe's coders suck and they haven't produced a good version of flash for linux.

zinc · 21 Jun 2009 at 16:51

My experience with flash on linux is also bad. Straight when I hit a flash page my cpu goes up and after maybe 15mins the fans start to go. Every update to flash seems to make the performance worse.

One thing I do is install flash block plugin for FF, you can allow all the sites you want flash to appear on eg youtube iplayer etc, while any other websites with flash ads etc are not run, saves a bit of your resources.