The best software for viewing flash content on GNU/Linux systems is Swfdec

I haven’t written about flash playing in a while but this Slashdot post about the state of Adobe Flash Player support on Linux reminded me to mention something. Swfdec is by far the most complete player for GNU/Linux. It also runs on 64-bit systems. That’s not to say it is without its problems, but it works well enough most of the time that I have no need to follow what Adobe does any longer. It looks like Debian has both Swfdec 0.6 and 0.7 branches available. I’m not sure if those have made it to Ubuntu 8.10 but it would be nice if they did. Of course I’m also willing to test the latest Gnash to see if it has overtaken Swfdec in compatibility or performance.