[keyringlight]

Depends on what task you're doing, and to a certain extent how you prefer to do it. For example sure there's plenty of ways to tag/rename media files, but I've yet to find something that matches the power of Mp3tag in a GUI under linux.

[m01]

Have you tried kid3 (https://kid3.kde.org)? It has both a GUI and a CLI.

From a quick glance at the feature lists it looks quite comparable.

[keyringlight]

I just did, have you actually tried using them side-by-side? It's hard for me to look favorably on kid3. I actually gave myself 5-10m to try and learn kid3 and a lot of what seems like obvious ways to accomplish a task like 'rename these files using their tags' didn't do anything. I even broke out the manual which didn't help/explain if there was a different mindset I need to adopt. I could manage to manually edit tags/rename file by file, but that seems like table stakes for anything that handles media files (even a file manager) let alone an application that is meant to be a specialist in that area, and we're not into any advanced functionality yet.

More generally though it's not about one specific type of tool, it's that windows and linux have been different ecosystems for decades and that has encouraged different strengths and weaknesses. To catch up would mean a lot of effort even if you're just aiming to be equivalent, or use projects like WINE to blur the lines and use the win32 tool as though the specific platform doesn't matter so much.

[m01]

I get that you wanted to make a general point. In case you're still curious about this specific case:

It's been a long time since I last used Mp3tag, so I tried the latest Mp3tag in WINE (seems to work nicely) for comparison. I think the basic operations (editing tags) actually do work similarly: in both you select file(s), edit the tag you want to in the GUI and changes get applied to any selected file(s) when you press save.

Renaming filenames based on tags also works according to that principle in kid3, you select the files you want to change (rename) and then use the `Format (arrow pointing from tag fields to filename field)` to specify what the filename pattern should look like and then use the `Tag 1` or `Tag 2` button to fill the placeholders from the (e.g.) ID3v1/ID3v2 tag, and click save to apply the changes.

In Mp3tag you'd also highlight the files, but unlike other tag editing operations you use the `convert->tag to filename` menu item/button, which pops up a wizard asking for the pattern and confirmation.

I'm guessing coming from Mp3tag you tried to use kid3's `Tools->Apply filename format` option, which I believe ensures the filename doesn't include special characters by doing string replacements (these are configured in the settings under `Files->Filname format`). I was wondering if that was perhaps confusingly named, so I had a look in Mp3tag to see what this functionality was called there, but I couldn't find it. I'm sure it's possible somehow, but it probably involves scripting [1].

I noticed that Mp3tag seems to be able to automatically fetch album art whereas in kid3 you need to get the image yourself. I suspect more advanced functionality (scripting etc) will work differently in the two tools.

[1] https://community.mp3tag.de/t/character-replacement-for-tag-...