Gnomad2 in my opinion is much better than the Windows software. It works great, and I can run Gnomad2 as a normal user as well.

I was given one of these a couple of years back. If I were to choose a music player, this would most definitely not be the one I chose.

It only supports mp3 and wma, no ogg or other formats. The Windows software supplied with it is rubbish. Gnomad2 is OK, but it extremely annoying to have to install it to access the files on the player. In the past I have tried to use it to transfer data files between work and home, but this is problematic - for example, it won't support files over about 3GB, which was a pain when I needed to transfer a DVD iso. Gnomad2 has crashed several times for me, under different distros. The player can't be charged by the USB port, unlike many other players. If the battery runs out while transferring files onto the player, the files get lost. They take up space on the disk, but you can't access them without using the recovery mode (which was difficult to find instructions for).

If only someone would write some new firmware à la Rockbox. Being able to write directly to the device as a USB drive would make things a lot easier, and support for other audio formats would also be great.

One further comment (not specific to Linux): when songs are uploaded to the player, they are stored as files called "Song Title.mp3".

This causes two problems: first, when you download the songs to a different computer, the filenames are not the same as originally specified, so if you name your files with the track number in them in order for them to appear in the correct order in xmms, this information will be lost.

The second problem is that you can't have two songs with the same title on the player, even if they're from different albums (e.g. a live version or different mix), or even if they're by different bands.