In 2007 System76 was granted a license from Adobe to pre-install Flash on all our laptops and desktops.

Back then, Flash was the only way to unlock all the wonders of the Internet. Watching cat videos on YouTube, annoying your friends with “Can you milk my cow?” requests from FarmVille, and, of course, enjoying the pure ecstasy of webpages brimming with animated Flash ads. Real bread and butter stuff.



Okay, I jest a little. But this was the out-of-the-box web experience that consumers had come to expect. In terms of making a great first impression with our customers, especially those new to Ubuntu, this was an important detail. And to be fair, there was a lot of fantastic Flash content out there (even cat videos).



So from 2007 till today, we’ve pre-installed Flash in our golden images (under the above mentioned license grant from Adobe).

But starting tomorrow, we wont be. In fact, as I’m writing this, xz is humming along compressing our newly remastered golden images, sans Flash.

We’re doing this for two reasons:

These days, Flash isn’t really needed to enjoy the “full web experience” Security, security, security… did I mention security?

For security reasons, we strongly recommend that all our customers purge Flash from their systems:

sudo apt-get purge flashplugin-installer

Even if you think you need Flash, you should experiment with a trial separation (by purging it with the above command). You’ll probably be surprised by how little your web experience changes.



Seriously, right after you purge Flash, you can immediately celebrate by watching cat videos till your eyes bleed. All the Internets, still right at your fingertips.

If you want to return to the Flash + Firefox setup that we’ve shipped in the past, just do this:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer



However, if you truly need Flash, you’ll probably be safest using Chrome, which includes an embedded Flash implementation that is sandboxed in a way that should mitigate the inevitable Flash zero-days to come. Yet one Flash zero-day has already manged to punch through the sandbox, so it’s still prudent to avoid Flash altogether.



Flash, we had some lovely times together, but… farewell.

