I have only looked at Banshee and Rhythmbox. There were enough plusses on the Rhythmbox side to make me keep it as the music player of choice.

On the stability side, both seem to crash as often and randomly. Looking at the changelog for Rhythmbox, at least some of those were fixed between 0.9.5 and 0.9.6. I will probably recompile 0.9.6 and see if that’s true.

On the speed side, Rhythmbox beats Banshee hands-down. Browsing a repository over DAAP is especially painful with Banshee – changing from one repository to another takes ages even for low thousands of items. Rhythmbox seems to do a much better job at caching that information.

On the usability side, I was able to figure out how to create a playlist in Rhythmbox, but it wasn’t obvious how to do it in Banshee, plus I managed to crash it several times in that area.
Looks like I’ve made my mind…

I’ve started by installing rPath Linux on the laptop, and just finished reinstalling it with Foresight Linux, mostly because I was looking for more recent versions of NetworkManager, XChat and a working suspend-to-RAM. Plus, Foresight has a lot more desktop goodies.
After using Foresight for about half an hour, I can say I got 33% of what I wanted. XChat has been replaced with xchat-gnome, and suspend didn’t work in different ways (no kernel support – easily fixed by running the rPath Linux kernel). Another thing is the music player: Foresight comes with Banshee whereas Fedora Core 5 comes with Rhythmbox. Apparently I will have to look at Amarok too.

I did spend some of my time with paperwork, inherrent to getting a new job (new health insurance plan etc.).

Hopefully I will not be subject to the viruses that are affecting some of my friends (no, not computer viruses, I’m talking about cold/flu), and the weather on Sunday will hold for the orienteering event.