Linux Roon Control GUI Please [not on roadmap, you may try to use Wine]

It was indeed an answer to your question @danny

Sorry for being a little imprecise. Of course I run Roon Remote with Wine. I am not aware of any other possibility.

Driver may not be the correct term - libraries would be more accurate. In my case it was about individual Mesa libraries.

I guess I am under the misconception that this could be circumvented by a native Linux application, at least with one that is supposed to run on different distributions, similar to the Roon Server install script.

I’m thinking more along the lines of something like Snap or Flatpak:

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Oh that’s a neat idea… run snap or flatpak Roon-in-Wine.

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Yes, it’s installing Wine and getting all the parts of that to agree with each other that’s the problem, not Roon itself. A flatpak version would make things a lot easier.

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Each time I tried getting remote working in wine I was met with failure. Ended up giving up on it.

In general Roon on Wine works fine but it does have a few caveats:

  • Local playback requires installing roon bridge separately, without it Roon on Wine can only be used as controller
  • Local roon bridge runs as root on startup all the time instead of being active only when the gui app is (this could probably be worked around but is still extra effort compared to other platforms)
  • Local roon bridge is detected as a separate device from the gui which means it has to be set as public zone in order for gui app to be able to control it.
  • Setup via Wine breaks sometimes and requires wipe and complete reinstallation of Roon, luckily this process is relatively painless thanks to roon-on-wine script

I just wanted to write that I have never had any problem with Wine in 1.5 years, and never anything break, and now the Roon.exe in the new 903 build is eating 85% CPU (and wineserver64 another 30%) of my i7 for doing nothing :cry:

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16 posts were merged into an existing topic: High CPU usage of remote in Wine with Build 903 - some affected users but apparently not everyone

By the way, geeky people, who typically use Linux and nothing else, are the natural early adopters of audiophile network audio software like Roon. Roon Labs may think we are a minority but we are an important minority.

Happiness is a happy geek, I say. Well, at least I say that to my wife.

True, but that’s all we’ve got, and if Roon can make it work properly on Wine like it used to do, they can avoid developing a Linux app.

From the current dependency on .NET Framework, I imagine they are waiting for .NET MAUI to be supported on Linux (as I am too, for my own app) so then they can really have one codebase on all platforms, just like they say they have, but don’t.

:slight_smile:

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I’m not really sure what the Architecture link tells us. It says nothing of the remote’s architecture. Well, and that Linux is not officially supported :slight_smile:

I don’t know what Microsoft’s MAUI plans are, but on their website they don’t mention Linux. OTOH of course they did a lot of development work on the Linux subsystem recently, so who knows.

As for Roon developing a Linux app, or making some effort for Wine to avoid this, I don’t know if their user numbers warrant it for the remote. Linux desktop user numbers in general are objectively small, it’s just how it is

What interests me most, currently, is if the CPU issue affects everyone, and what the factor is if it doesn’t

My link takes you directly to this text:

Roon’s rich user interface runs on Windows, OS X or macOS, Android, and Apple iOS. Roon develops the control software for all platforms out of a single code-base. This is deeply important to our ability to deliver an extremely rich experience across many hardware and software platforms.

MAUI is not supported on Linux. This is another topic, of course. Microsoft has provided .NET Core on Linux, Visual Studio Code on Linux, ASP .NET on Linux, and now … not MAUI. People have ditched Windows and moved to Linux. People are understandably p***d about that.

As for Roon developing a Linux app, see my previous comment:

By the way, geeky people, who typically use Linux and nothing else, are the natural early adopters of audiophile network audio software like Roon. Roon Labs may think we are a minority but we are an important minority.

I think Roon Labs misunderstands the market in this respect.

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Yes OK, I see, it’s a very general statement though :slight_smile:

Personally I don’t share your view that the typical audiophile person is Linux-affine. I am a regular on the Naim forum and the majority seems to be older, computer-challenged people who have a hard time with the basics of Mac and Windows.

I would, of course, appreciate very much a solution to the Wine problem because the fact that the remote ran nicely on Wine was an important reason for me to become a Roon lifer. I did believe that they would try not to break it (see my exchange with Danny about the thread title at the start of this thread), but I am aware that there were never any promises.

I think roon understands the market very well, which is why they developed the nucleus as a turnkey device for the vast majority who don’t want to muck about with any OS at all.

I wonder what percentage of Roon users bought a Nucleus. Compare that to the percentage who built a Roon Rock.

What does “building” a Roon Rock have to do with using the Roon remote on a Linux desktop/laptop?

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Linux, and the difference between turnkey people and network hobbyists.

The fact that Rock is based on Linux is coincidental and most people don’t care because the main point of Rock is that you never are in direct contact with the OS. As long as it just works, it could run on Win (if we ignore the licensing issue), FreeBSD, or Hurd. Installing Rock on a NUC can be done by all but the most computer-challenged people.

This is very different from needing the Roon remote to work on Linux because one’s main desktop/laptop runs Linux, which is a minority thing, even though you do and I have also done for 3 decades.

Linux as minority GUI is starting to end.
M$ is switching more and more to Linux subsystem to offer its products as services Windows GUI as a Service Office as a Service etc.

Steam Deck uses Linux and users are happy with it.

it is time to add roon remote support for Linux!

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Steam has it’s own variant of Wine called Proton. Most of the games offered by Steam under Linux use Proton to run the Windows version. So just try and do the same for Roon on Linux (already mentioned in the title of this thread).

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i know - and its a good workaround.
A workaround is still no solution.

A native roon-remote would be a solution :wink: