The Netflix service now has a lot of Linux users

Oct 10, 2014 17:04 GMT  ·  By

Now that Netflix is finally letting people watch their steaming services on Linux, there is a sort of confusion among Linux users regarding the supported platforms that has to be addressed.

A Netflix engineer contacted the Ubuntu developers a couple of weeks ago and asked them to upgrade a library in their system, which would allow the streaming company to lift the user agent restrictions for Ubuntu.

The thing is that even if Netflix has talked with the Ubuntu devs, there is no restriction for other Linux distros to have the same support, as long as they meet the requirements. I talked earlier with Ikey Doherty, the developer of Evolve OS. This is a Linux distribution built from scratch that is not using anything as a base but has no problem running the HTML5 stream.

He has confirmed the fact that, as long as the OS meets a simple set of criteria, everyone should be able to use Netflix. Users need to have the NSS library at least at version 3.16.2 and Google Chrome 37. As long as these two dependencies are satisfied, any Linux OS is able to provide access to Netflix.

The only ones who will not be able to watch Netflix are the ones who are living outside of the supported streaming zones. Enjoy!