Recently, I decided to install elementary OS on my machine, and I am having some minor issues.
Firstly, I can't figure out how to install flash.I know you can do some stuff with the plugins for chromium and firefox, but I would rather have it installed so I can watch trailers on steam, as well as use other applications that require flash.
Secondly, whenever I try to make a youtube video full screen, the video expands horizontally, but not vertically, leaving me with a horizontally streched image.
Thirdly, when I open firefox, the search bar in the center of the screen does not work. I can type text into it, but when I press enter, it does nothing.
The last issue is difficult to describe. When I exit a game, I can only view part of the desktop, being able to "scroll" around it by moving my mouse to the edge of the screen like in an RTS game. shortcuts and Icons are functional in this state.
I would greatly appreciate any help any of you could give me.Thanks in advance.
If you're running the old version I can tell you right now that flash or steam are not going to work as they should.
Then there is the mutter port they use, which can be pretty nightmarish, and although Pantheon should be gtk3 compatible (I don't know, I've never used it), I doubt it has all the difficult details right.
The screen issues should be solvable. I would apt-get Arandr and try with that. It's also pretty easy to calculate the exact VESA codes and set the mode manually, but it's not exactly something that I would want to do every time I'm going in or coming out of a particular application.
In my opinion, Elementary OS is one of those projects that are really nice if they work out of the box on your system (which would be an older system as the Elementary OS community only releases very sporadically), and if they do exactly what you want them to do. But it's certainly not a tier-one distro, and there are a lot of bugs in it, and with such a small community it's very hard to get the bugs sorted.
You've started your thread by describing yourself as a linux noob. In all honesty, a marginal distro is not the way to go for you. You should really start with a tier-one distro that has a lot of documentation online and a big problem-solving community behind it. You'd definitely be doing yourself a favour.