I had a very unsatisfactory experience with Rhythmbox recently.
This is an example of why they say Open Source's biggest competitor is itself. I want to use my Ubuntu 8.04 machine as the main machine where the music in my office comes from, because my Ubuntu machine has power to spare and it's just kind of sitting there as a testing server for five people or so.
I see it as a great chance to get back into thinking and practicing FOSS-focused computing. Which is to say: I want to use Open Source tools when they're as functional as the closed/proprietary tools I have sitting on the other machines on my desktop, but not if it means I have to spend two weeks troubleshooting why something isn't working the way it was advertised-- or, in this case, why something isn't working now that was working 10 minutes ago.
I have very low tolerance for that kind of silliness. Which brings me to my point. I had a very unsatisfactory experience with Rhythmbox recently.

1. Rhythmbox could play the few MP3s that were in my library, but most of my files were not in the library.
2. I like whatever player I'm using to scrobble, so...
3. I enabled the Last.FM plugin in Rhythmbox.
4. Then, I added my main music directory to Rhythmbox.
5. Rhythmbox asked me if I wanted to find a codec to play the music I was adding. That's strange, I thought. It can already play Mp3s. What codec could it want? But I clicked the option to go ahead and enable MP3 playback. And the machine merrily rolled along and enabled some kind of codec, as there probably are some acc's or something in there causing some trouble.
6. Now I get a "Can't Open Stream" error when I try to play MP3s.
7. I can, however, play mp3s in VLC and the standalone Last.FM application works just fine.
8. The error message is neither helpful nor intuative.
9. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail.

I have neither the time nor the interest to troubleshoot what's wrong here. Mayhaps I'm the wrong type of user for Linux? Maybe. If the wrong type of user is the type that just wants to get some work done. But I also think that if Linux genuinely has the goal of addressing Bug #1, this kind of piddling failure has got to go away.

Ever the tinkerer, I plopped andLinux on my wife's Vista laptop this morning. 700MB , and a few WTFs later, KDE 3.5 applications are running seamlessly on Windows Vista. Apart from the massive gaggers that running a giant executable installer caused for Vista, the install was about the same as any other windows install.

But, because andLinux is an Ubuntu derivative, installing the Gnome Aps I miss the most when I'm in Windows was a simple apt-get install away.  Mmmm... Bluefish on Windows, finally.

I can't speak to the security (or lack there of), nor am I willing to give the project a full five stars until sound is running. I mean, the main reason for installing KDE on anything is to get at Amarok. If you can't understand why putting Amarok on as many of your computers as possible would be a life's mission, you're not running Amarok.
Installing andLinux also opens a massive security hole. The fact is, andLinux can read and write from anywhere on the windows partition, and the C:/ drive is set up as the default mount point.  Regardless of who's logged in. So yeah, andLinux can do things to Vista that even vista can't do. Wow!

Anyway, this is, far and away, the _easiest_ way to install linux functionality to your Windows PC. Try it out.

I spent the better part of the day trying to get the PlayStation EyeToy functioning on Ubuntu. I think I can say I've succeeded. But at the same time, I think I've hit the wall.  The eyetoy camera works. I haven't really messed the microphone, I assume it doesn't work, but that's fine, there are lots of microphone inputs on this machine.
So, I can make pictures appear in _several_ ways. Certain programs use certain drivers that certainly don't always work. And Flash? Fuggedaboutit.
So, here's the problem. Until the world gets over flash, the only thing I'm really interested in doing with my webcam is almost exclusively flash-based. (See also: Seesmic and Ustream.)
And, as near as I can tell, Linux Flash doesn't yet support the Video4Linux driver, which I'm told is the one I've had the most luck with. And, according to the monkeys responding to this post, "Nobody in the Linux community is remotely interested in using webcams with flash."

So here's a breakdown of my experiments today.
First, here's the eyetoy running in Camorama. It's the first time I got any kind of picture out of it. Yes, it's broken, but I felt this was a big first step.

Without making _any_ changes, here's the same driver and camera shooting video via the Ekiga softphone. (I'm certain I could be doing more with my Ekiga Softphone account along with my Vonage Subscription, but maybe not. That's beside the point.) Notice how it's actually capturing an image that is not broken.

So, I loaded up Seesmic!

No good.
I did, however, record this video for you all. It's five seconds of imageless silence. I like to imagine that it's crashing Seesmic's servers the world around.  See! Linux is Easy.

Finally, I installed camstreams, and it grabbed a bunch of driver packages during the install. Damn you KDE! It worked the best out of all of them. At least I can do webcammy stuff via a manual ftp.

In summary, it is my belief that Webcams via Flash for Linux "Just Working" are a long way off. I'm disappointed by reports that those who have built in webcams in there tiny, tiny Linux laptops have discovered that flash will not work for them either.

Linux will not be a competitor to propriety operating systems until it stops sucking in regards flash. "Wa! This is Adobe's Fault!" people often respond to criticisms of the state of Flash in linux.

It might be Adobe's fault, but it's our problem.

I’m not saying I would prefer a Microsoft product to an open source one, don’t get me wrong. But I am saying this: The last few weeks running Vista on my new laptop have showed me exactly how far behind Linux Desktops lag from "modern" OS experiences. It’s never been more clear to me the trade off you make when you make the choice to go Free and Open Source. It seem that in most cases. you’re picking the the lesser product.

The "Windows Tax" is a fallacy. That Vista is a miserable OS is a matter of perspective. From my perspective, "It Just Works" has really been the case with Vista and the exception in Ubuntu.

Case in Point: There is _no_ comparison between "Drivel" and "Windows Live Writer." I have been playing with Windows Live over the last couple of days, and I have to tell you, its not as bad as you think. In fact, if it was open source, I would be in love with it.

Windows Live Writer strikes me on first blush to be a superior blogging client. Look. I’m not one of those guys who hand codes each and every entry using raw XML. I wish I was, but I’m lazy. I’m a WYSIWYG kind of guy. But Live Writer is the first Blogging client that inserts Technorati Tags in a way that I like.

It integrates nicely with WordPress and has a kick ass "Preview" mode that you can use to proof your posts before you publish them. It’s got an SDK, for god’s sake.

(This is a repost, reconstructed from the Google Cashe)