But early this morning, while watching the live feed of Democracy Now!, I paused the video to try to watch an .ogv I was ripping with Thoggen. No dice. So, I decided to try listening to a podcast with Banshee. Same problem: wouldn’t even start. So, I started cursing GNOME, assuming for some reason that the old problem of only one application being able to use the sound-system at a time had come back. So, I close the browser and try again. Nope.

So, I tried re-opening the browser and watching the video again. The browser hung. I opened the Terminal to kill it. The Terminal opened and immediately hung. I tried closing the two and re-opening. Nope. I tried restarting X, but it gave me a blank screen when I logged back in. Finally, I just restarted the whole machine, uninstalled Adobe Flash and installed libswfdec.

I can’t watch all YouTube videos, but at least my computer’s not crashing because Adobe doesn’t care about their GNU/Linux users.