Linux is nothing if not a great place to watch your favorite vids and listen to your favorite tunes; today I'd like to focus a little more in depth on the what there is in the music player department.
The grandmaster champion has to be, by all considerations, Amarok; let's take a look at what it's capable of.
It's a long list, but here's just a sample: create a playlist, either by dragging and dropping tunes on the Amarok icon, or putting them in a folder you've told Amarok to watch.
In a convenient sidebar, tell Amarok to fetch the lyrics for the song you're currently listening to, the cover art for the 'album', or the Wikipedia entry for the group/singer. Fetching the lyrics doesn't always work out, especially if you are listening to a foreign band, but for it's implementation it's plenty nifty.
Those are the biggies, in my view, but there's tons more that this powerful app can do: use MySQL to access your database of music (how many songs do you have to need that?!?); send out a huge, honking (I mean huge and honking) headline that announces each and every song that's about to play (be sure to switch that one off pronto); support for last.fm (streaming music); integration with K3b, the CD burning app; podcasting support; and support for all the major music compression formats, including, well, read the list (too long to diary here).
Amarok is the master, but by no means the only choice out there; it's not even one I would consider using, and I love listening to music. Just a tad bit flash for my tastes. By far the cleanest and best music player (and this is the definitive word!) is XMMS. It should be familiar to Windows users, as it's kind of similar to WinAmp, and it's got all the strengths of Amarok, without all the flash. Plays everything, very small RAM footprint, doesn't take over half your desktop (sorry, Amarok lovers!)
It's the mini music player that will satisfy the minimalist in us all.
There are others, so in fairness I'll mention them: Rhythmbox, the default GNOME music player; it's largely an iTunes copy, but with the added feature of iChat GAIM integration--what you are playing shows up in your instant messaging/chat window. Most of the same bloated wonderful features of Amarok, just in the GNOME camp.
You'll need some music to fill those players with, and there's no better place to get them than this; really fresh music and totally free, plus all the full albums come in mp3 and Ogg formats! For you GNU/Linux purists, of which I count myself, there's no need to soil your machine with the non-free mp3 codecs. Ogg Vorbis goodness, and at 300+kbit/s you get it in high fidelity.
I'm sure I overlooked some fine music players or trod on some sacred cows, so please show me the errors of my ways, in the comments below. Cheers! And yes, I know I discussed some of this stuff previously; I felt it was important ground to go over again as I 've run out of ideas wanted to simplify it a bit for newer users.
Some interesting open source news today: Solaris is going to make a more Linux-like release of their OS; wonder what's behind that?
A couple more notes for beginning users of Linux; if you are just dabbling out of curiosity, then Ubuntu is certainly the way to go. It's easy enough now that you can pick most of what you need to know in a day or two, without messing in the command line.
If you are looking for a Linux distribution that has more of a professional polish, in terms of look and feel, you would do quite well choosing OpenSuse.
The forums for both of those distros are extremely newbie friendly and will help you in no time at all. Ubuntuforums and Suseforums are the places you want to check out for your questions and comments, and if I can help out (with my severely constrained knowledge, drop me a comment).
If you want a distro that will shorten your lifespan by several decades and generally drive you up a wall, but teach you the true inner workings of Linux (replete with a sometimes grouchy moderator in the forums), then Gentoo is your distro of choice.
If you want to try the most cutting edge Linux out there, then head over to this site; you can custom make your distro--they promise a major upgrade that is much faster in a few hours.
And don't forget to check this site; I cannot overemphasize what an excellent resource it is for both newer users and old hands; they (actually he, it's run by a single individual) announce new updates, link to newsletters, podcasts, reviews, forums, and keep an up to date list of every single Linux package available for installation. Also many fine Linux links to other Linux sites to be found there. A true treasure trove of Linux-dom.
Debian running Beryl: