Installing Adobe Flash on Arch Linux, and why it’s so complicated.

Flash may have gotten some fancy Adobe branding, but it’s still an old product.

The following few paragraphs are a recap of Flash’s development, and not a guide. You might wanna skip down a little for the informative part. ❤

Since the start of the internet, website owners have always been trying to build bigger and better websites. Want an example? Just browse http://awwwards.com for 30 seconds, and you’ll see just how much effort some people put in to their sites. As time went on, however, people wanted more — more than simple HTML, CSS and Javascript could provide — so along came Macromedia with their new product: ‘Flash Player’.

(It’s actually a little more complicated than that; the original product was called Futuresplash Animator, which was later bought by Macromedia and renamed to Flash, which was then bought by Adobe. Kinda confusing, huh?)

Flash Player allowed developers to create fully-fledged animations, high-quality graphics and even video games! Even better: developers could embed all these on their websites with a press of a button! Pretty cool, right? In fact, it was so cool that Adobe bought Macromedia, and renamed Macromedia Flash to Adobe Flash. (That’s right! Adobe Flash wasn’t even created by Adobe!). When Flash was in it’s prime (a few years ago, now), it was an incredibly powerful piece of software, and some would say it still is — as a result, Flash support in browsers became pretty commonplace as it became the new trend among developers. Over time, however, Flash began to get old, and new alternatives were being released to take over. Fortunately for Adobe though, Flash has such a large market share that most alternatives would become deprecated themselves before any Flash user would even think about leaving Adobe’s product behind.

As it turns out, this is where the guide begins.

Due to Flash getting old (in fact, it’s so old that Adobe are finally ending support for it in 2020!), browser support for the product has begun to die out, and many development teams have left Flash out of their newer browser versions altogether, and require users to install it themselves. In this guide, I’ll show you how to install Adobe Flash on your Arch Linux computer, with steps for most browsers. It’s not too hard, but we’re going to be using the command line, which is a required skill for anyone working with Arch.

An Explanation:

sudo pacman -Syu flashplugin

Let’s dissect this command!

1: sudo tells Arch that we want to run this command with root privileges, which is like running something as the Admin on Windows — it gives us extra power over our system.

2: pacman is the package manager for Arch Linux which installs packages.

3: -Syu is the type of process we want to run. In this instance, -S tells pacman that we’re performing a sync process, AKA something that uses packages, pretty much. And yu tells pacman that we want to update the known list of packages before we install, just to make sure we’ve got the most up-to-date version of the package.

4: flashplugin is the version of Flash that runs on Firefox. If you have Firefox or any Firefox-based browser, you can skip the rest and just use this command. If not, keep reading!

Firefox, Pale Moon, Waterfox (firefox-based browsers)

sudo pacman -Syu flashplugin

Chrome, Chromium, Vivaldi, Opera (chrome-based browsers)

sudo pacman -Syu pepper-flash

This command is a bit different; it downloads pepper-flash which is the Chrome version of flashplugin.

If you have a browser that is different from Chrome and Firefox, or you do not know what your browser is based on, comment on this post and I will be more than happy to help you!

I hope this was a helpful post, and if there’s anything I’ve missed, or anything you believe I could improve, please let me know! (I’m 14 and looking to improve my writing skill!)

Have a great day!