Do I bother putting Flash on?

I think it is a good idea to refresh your computer system every so often and not only to clear out “cobwebs” and remove unused programs and libraries.  I think it is good to do a refresh so that you can take a moment and figure out what you have used, and what you haven’t. What should you keep and what to dump.

 

Take for instance I just installed Fedora 19, Gnome, on my laptop.

 

This laptop is older (pre-Lenovo deal) IBM Thinkpad with not a ton of horsepower compared to modern devices (Pentium M @ 1.8 GHz, 2GB of RAM), but it is adequate to doing most things.  It runs Windows 7 fine, so long as I don’t do too much in the way of heavy compiling or video editing.  The good thing is I don’t do that too much already and now I have a desktop to handle some of the heavier tasks.

 

So now that I have a fresh Fedora 19, Gnome, installation once my updates are done I will be able to start looking at which programs I want to install and actually use, and which programs I usually install but never use.

 

The first item coming to mind, though, is Flash; do I really need it?

 

YouTube plays many of its videos using HTML5 instead of Flash and outside of a couple of games I really don’t use Flash all that much as far as I am aware.  If I have a need for Flash, I can still use the desktop or switch to the Windows 7 hard drive.

 

Probably one of the more used, at home, Flash application I use is to listen to Pandora. Pandora has years of my music preferences collected and I have my stations pretty much the way I like them so I am not too interested in trying another music service that allows streaming over the Internet which I need to “teach” all over again.  Not to mention, to hope that it will recognize that if  like one song flagged with “rap”, that I am not suddenly interested in “gangsta rap” in the middle of my Christmas-themed radio station!

 

Thankfully I may be able to fulfill this with the use of Pithos.

So between Pithos and HTML5, I am going to see how far can I get without Flash before breaking down and installing it.