*** Editor’s note: While this software is no longer recommended, this entry will not be removed for historical reasons. ***

Flash and Linux. It’s a long, inglorious story. What happened last: After Google stopped supplying the Flash PPAPI plugin directly with its Chrome browser in the summer of 2016, the PepperFlash plugin installer supplied with Ubuntu and Debian non-free no longer worked. Why? Because it first downloaded the Chrome browser and then extracted the Flash plugin from it.

Adobe has now taken over the task of providing Flash for Linux again, and will continue to do so until the end of 2020. Until then, the manufacturer also promises security updates. However, this is a castrated Flash version that does not support hardware acceleration.

Debian and Ubuntu have updated their PepperFlash plugin in a way that it downloads Flash for Linux from Adobe’s servers.

However, the only reason to install this package is, if you are still visiting websites use the outdated Flash technology instead of HTML5. This is not always the fault of negligent website owners. There is probably a lot of archived Flash content with historical value that can only be ported to HTML5 with great effort. If you install Flash, you should make sure to configure the plugin so that it is only activated on request. This is because Flash is a potential security and data protection risk.

Installation

sudo apt install pepperflashplugin-nonfree