Re: Genuine question
The thing about the playlist creation on a PC only applied to WinPhone 8.0, it is fixed in 8.1 But to answer your question, a Windows phone and say, Linux (Kubuntu 12.04 LTS) are problematic, at least as far as WinPhone 8.0 go, which is what my experiments were done with. The phone appeared to be an MTP type device, it didn't appear as a nice USB mass-storage device. Only the Nautilus file manager could recognise it and attempt to copy files to and from it, but these operations were not reliable.
Getting music onto the phone was especially troublesome, as some kind of processing appears to take place as files are added, involving setting up lists of album titles, artists and track names. In the end I found only two reliable ways to get stuff on and off the phone: (1) use the phone's SD card in another card reader attached to your particular computer, Linux works fine for this. When the card goes back in the phone, the phone scans it for new files and sorts itself out quite well, just like the Blackberry Bold does, or (2) connect it to a Windows PC, when it magically appears as a storage device you can drag and drop with. I used VMWare running a Windows 8.1 image to do this, its all speedy enough to not be a problem.
Last time I tried, I could not use any cloud-based services (OneDrive) to save stuff to the phone's local storage, I don't know if that still applies. WinPhone is still very much a moving target, extra features and enhancements get added now and then. It felt as though it was only just out of beta when it shipped, it had some very rough edges and absent features.
Edit: it seems as though MTP can be made to work, as more recent Android devices use it. I expect that the Lumia can be made to work via MTP, or will soon be supported if it currently isn't.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
