No one — well, very few, anyway — who uses Linux lacks the experience of Linux being the last major platform to gain native support for proprietary applications. Whether it's being held at arms length by rabid legal teams or just being overlooked as an important market, we all know the pain of finding out our shiny new gizmo is useless on our Linux systems. Wednesday, however, marked the end of one such experience, as Adobe released the latest version of its Flash Player — with full Linux support out of the box.

The release of Adobe Flash Player 10 — in beta release since May — brings a dramatic change from its predecessor's release in 2006, where Linux users were forced to wait more than six months for a Linux-compatible version. Version 10 bears full Linux support for its bevy of features, including support drawn from its film-oriented After Effects CS4 for custom effects and filters to animate and change effects at runtime on rich media content. It also includes native 3D transformation/animation, new advanced sound APIs and a calibration engine for application-level audio processing, including dynamic audio generation.

The move to full, on-time support for Linux gives Adobe another edge over the competing Silverlight software, which has left Linux support out of its official offerings. Adobe also plans to provide Solaris support later in the year. Flash 10 features are also scheduled to appear in the next release of Adobe's AIR platform, which is expected as a triple-release for Windows, Mac, & Linux by the end of 2008.

Linux downloads are available from Adobe's website in .deb, .rpm, tar.gz, APT, and YUM formats.