Not Unexpectedly: K3b is Just Swell for CD and DVD Burning in GNU/Linux

When I wrote about using Brasero for CD burning in GNOME a few months ago, I realized that the KDE app K3b was out there and probably pretty good, but Brasero was fine for what I was doing at the time so I didn't look any further.

I also figured I'd want to try K3b soon enough when I needed more options and flexibility. Well it didn't take many burning jobs to get there. I wanted to burn a data backup DVD and realized that Brasero was dereferencing symbolic links. That is, if it finds a link to a directory or file, it counts linked files as actual files to be added to the compilation rather than just links. I can understand that some people might want this behavior, but just as surely some people (like me) may not. But when I went looking for a way to set a preference on this, I couldn't find a place to configure any settings. You take it or leave it, I guess.

So I headed directly to Ubuntu's Add/Remove programs and had K3b running in a couple of minutes. It's fairly intuitive to work with and it didn't take much experimentation to figure out how to make it treat links the way I wanted.

There was one thing that was a bit annoying. At first I tried picking the "verify" option for the burned disc, but then when I went to burn it, it complained that it couldn't figure out the size of the image, and played a "wah wah wah" sound effect. Kind of cute and clever, maybe, the first time. But as I tried a couple of more times it was irritating. It's bad enough that something isn't working, you have to be taunted repeatedly also? I eventually tried without the verify step and it worked fine. So that's something to figure out eventually, but I usually don't do the verify step anyway. (And I'm guessing that sound effects can be turned off, but that doesn't make it any less annoying.)

While I've just scratched the surface, I suspect K3b will be a suitable GNU/Linux replacement for the proprietary Nero Burning ROM software, and will probably be my main disc burning app. (Although I may continue to let Serpentine burn audio discs since it's quick and easy.)

Related: Brasero does the CD burning job in GNOME