Adobe has released an (update) beta of Flash Player 9 including versions for Linux and Vista.

The Linux release is reported to work for Fedora 6.
I couldn't get it to work completely (bad rendering and no sound) with the DR of Elive. Apparently, this flash beta will not work with ESD even if the proper ALSA libraries (libaound.so) are present and ESD uses ALSA.
The latest stable release of Simply Mepis also had no sound despite the use of ALSA but the rendering was much better.
Texstar, the maintainer of PCLinuxOS posted on the Adobe forums that he couldn't get it to work (both Firefox and Konqy crashed) with his distro. So I figured if he couldn't get it to work, I sure as hell couldn't.
--walt
sorry about that paul, i've edited the entry.
I know better.
Flash is better than Quicktime, I agree
The only flash thing on the entire site is the sound. The usersound player and chat sounds both of which are non-essential to the main functionality of keeping a journal.
Both use a 1px by 1px transparent flash swf to pipe sounds through to flash streaming audio. It amounts to about 15 lines of code out of around 10,000 lines of code for everything. I don't know if that constitutes "lots of stuff."
The previous alternative was basing sounds on the quicktime player but I find it is less reliable than flash and now quicktime requires a 35MB download with itunes from the apple site, which was too much to ask for people to download.