Every couple of years I try linux for a week, then promptly switch back to the mac.

I had a G5 imac that I used for over 5 years without every having to reinstall the OS. I finally had to go through the pain of a fresh install when I bought a new imac this past year, but once every 5 or 6 years is fine. I'm still using my first gen macbook pro. I really want to use linux, but I value my time enormously now that I have 2 kids, this means I use macs.

Just install a different browser. Chrome has Flash built-in, so no dependencies there. If you want Chromium, it's just a question of finding the right repository hosting pre-built packages.

Also, it sounds like there is a discrepancy between how you initially installed Flash, vs. how you're trying to do it now. If you have the Flash repository, it should be a simple update. "Should be," but since it's not, it sounds like you're using a different method now.

If you keep /home on its own partition, re-installing the distro should be trivial (although definitely overkill).

In terms of why the browser can't leave feedback anymore, nor play videos, those are bizarre breakages which makes me think you can't be sure it's not the hardware (perhaps run "dmesg" just to see if there's anything interesting, always do Memtest86+ to make sure you have good RAM).

With regards the install, it said "Click here to upgrade" and I did that. Nothing happened.

With regards a different browser, that may yet be what I do.

With regards a reinstall, it's older hardware, so there's every chance a newer version won't run - I've had that happen before.

And I have tested the hardware quite thoroughly - it's fine. Flash breaking is something I'm seeing on several platforms, including my Windows laptop, where Chrome regularly says "Oh look! Flash Crash!" (or something).

I love programming, I just hate computers. I wish I could go back to embedded work. I enjoyed fitting TCP stacks onto new chips with 100 bytes of RAM.

Bummer. A distro should never break on update. I wish I was more familiar with Suse. Oh well, I blame Flash :)

Is your mother-in-law really using a 7 year old version of Linux?

I would assume that's a typo, but then again your description of updating doesn't sound like any recent Linux experience I've had. And you do mention the hardware is too old for a modern distro.

If she was using that version, and the only thing that broke after all this time is Flash then that's pretty good going.

Totally agree with you. I also believe that operating systems should embrace the chrome way of just updating silently by default. Power users can disable this.

The unfortunate thing with this design is that it's quite often possible to break things by updating silently, too. My Cr-48 became almost unusably slow after the most recent update, and I seem to remember a bunch of Windows Phone 7 devices getting bricked in the same manner.

You have to have extraordinary quality control and testing on silent updates like that, and quite frankly, if OSes with a very limited number of variations on hardware can't get it right, how can we expect PC distributions to?

This is only OK when it comes from a wise and benevolent company (e.g. Google). I would not want to encourage this sort of behavior in all software (think Skype, Acrobat, etc... ugh!)

Wise and benevolent? I wouldn't encourage this behaviour from any company. It's risky and has a high chance of completely alienating your users if you don't get it exactly right, and and something breaks.

ubuntu can do automatic updates