It has probably been a few years since I tried to play an audio CD directly in Linux (as opposed to ripping it to FLAC). This evening I burned a couple of albums I bought as digital downloads so my wife could listen to them in the car and in her studio (she still prefers physical CDs, having resisted the smartphone revolution and abandoned her MP3 player for reasons I don't entirely understand). I wanted to play the CD to test it and make sure the burn was clean.
Turns out many of the common Linux media player apps don't seem to support direct CDDA playback decently any more! Audacious - no go. Amarok - no go. Kscd - hangs on startup, UI never appears. Mplayer - buffers and skips incessantly. Dragon Player - just doesn't sound right, seems like resampling artifacts? Kaffeine seems to work, at least, and there's a very minimalistic app called goobox that also seems to work... but after the first half dozen apps I tried were a no-go, I was starting to wonder if anything would let me just play the damn CD.
I mean, hey... I realize many people consider physical CDs to be obsolete these days, but this is kind of ridiculous.