I love Linux and can even live w/o playing the bleeding edge games that require a $600 graphics card and crazy RAM, however I do deduct points for just corky / goofy media players.

Yeah XMMS is nice for MP3's however I must say I like an application like WMP 7+ or WinAMP that is basically and all in one media player for the entire system. I hate having to use MPlayer & XMMS depending on what I am doing.

Mplayer is what most people prefer however it is just very blah - it does not seem refined and or polished like WinAMP or WMP.

Sorry, just my only complaint or issue I have with Linux and wish it was getting better but I don't see any progress.

I use Kaffeine (with Xine as the backend) for playing everything, though I also like AmaroK for music. I am sure you could use Mplayer for all your multimedia needs.

I will give Mplayer another try.

yeah i use Kaffeine too, but use Noatun over xmms as i was getting to many strange sound device conflicts. i do not like that. Noatun just works. it is not all shinny looking, but it works and works well. i can have it playing 24/7 for weeks on end (have done that just to test it) and not one time did it give any kind of error.