Burning CDs/DVDs in Linux with K3B

K3b is, without a doubt, one of the four or five most popular programs for Linux users (at least as far as graphic interfaces go), and easily the most popular disc burning application. Almost everybody needs to burn CDs or DVDs at some point, and most people are just not comfortable downloading a command line disc burning program and using the Terminal to interface with it. It's possible, but it sure isn't as... user-friendly.

Well, K3b is very user friendly. In fact, in addition to being the most popular disc burning application for Linux, it is probably the best disc burning program I've used, not just on Linux, but on any operating system. That isn't something I could have said a few months ago, but K3b recently released version 1.0, and with that, K3b took a huge leap forward as far as features.

Prior to version 1.0, K3b was a very adequate application, but was not - in my opinion - worthy of the mountains of praise heaped upon it. Sure, it had a nice-looking interface, and could do a lot of "stuff," but in all honesty, a lot of the features were pretty worthless for me. My disc-burning needs are fairly basic, so K3b's abilities - impressive though they were - didn't do much for me. To be an effective disc burning program (for my needs), an application needs to be able to do a few things: it should be able to burn a disc image to disc (both CD and DVD), burn audio files to an audio disc, burn regular files to a data disc (both CD and DVD), and... well... that's about it. Prior to version 1.0, K3b could do that, along with the following: mixed mode discs, Video CD and DVD, eMovix disc, copy CD or DVD, burn multi-session discs, and erase CD-RW and DVD-RW.