I would very much like to see Linux desktop integration too. I wouldn’t shell out for Roon otherwise, not enough bang for the buck. For now MPD on RPi + DigiOne works perfectly fine and I’ve got heaps of native clients available: gui, curses, cli, your choice.
Yeah, but no thanks. I know I can run it under Wine or in a virtual machine but it’s all too clunky, malware compatible solutions. I’d rather hope for a Flatpak for example, a sandbox with all its dependencies. I know it’s difficult to prepare a package for all the various distros out there.
I’d be quite happy for Roon to dictate what libs they need for a Linux desktop app to work, until then I run it using Wine on my Ryzen-based Linux workstation.
I am just joined the Roon community and currently exploring the software. I also miss a GUI on Linux, or at least a web-based client. Is there any planning to improve this really great software with this mssing feature?
I understand why this may not seem a priority for you, but it definitely feels like a missing feature to me. I’d love to have a dedicated, custom built front end running on a raspberry pi or similar with touchscreen display. The Roon Web Controller is great, and thanks to Mike_Plugge for his hard work on it, but it doesn’t yet give the same immersive feel as the official Roon GUI.
I wonder if you’ve considered pricing this work up and trying to crowd-fund it? That way you could let us, the crowd, decide if it’s worth doing; if we hit the target you can hire the programmers to do it, if we don’t you’ll at least be able to say you tried!
Thanks for the suggestion, do you know if this works on a raspberry pi? I was under the impression the windows version wouldn’t run on an AMD chip, or am I wrong about that?
No, I don’t think it would run on a Pi, it would be way below spec. My mistake. I skimmed your post and missed that bit.
I think you mean an ARM chip for the pi. It would run on AMD chips on a laptop or desktop. Roon Bridge runs fine on the Pi, but that doesn’t help you with your GUI issue…
Thanks for your suggestions. I now feel a bit more confident in investing in an x86 single board computer to give it a try.
Does anyone know the system requirements for running roon core as a controller only - to run it as controller + core is, I know, quite hungry, but if it’s run as a controller only is it more akin to the roon remote requirements, or does it need more oomph than that?
For Windows desktop use there’s a nice combined control+output application available. This allows me to browse for and listen to music on my office desktop PC.
Something similar is available for Mac and Android devices:
But there’s no such thing for regular Linux setups. Pity - all my lab PCs run linux, and I spend quite some time in that lab…
So, I’ll suggest that Roon control/output be ported to Linux in addition to the Windows/Mac/Android platforms.
I do not think that a Linux remote for roon has a high priority on the developers.
Just try using this script to install roon under wine: https://github.com/RoPieee/roon-on-wine
I’ve been doing this very successfully for some time now.
If you install the Windows version on Linux via roon-on-wine script and then separately install Linux version of Roon Bridge on the same machine you’ll be able to achieve the same result. The only downside is that Roon Bridge by default runs as root but afaik it can be forced to run as standard user
Scroll to the systemd service file (line starts with [Unit])
Replace root with your user in line User=
Remove the line Restart=on-abort (unless you want roon bridge to be running on your machine all the time)
Save changes
Run the script
Add your user to audio group (usermod -a -G audio USERNAME)
Change owner of the /var/roon folder to your user (sudo chown -R USERNAME:USERNAME /var/roon), otherwise Roon Bridge will crash on start
Restart roonbridge service (sudo systemctl restart roonbridge.service)
Launch Roon GUI, go to Settings > Audio. You should now be able to see audio devices connected directly to your Linu Desktop in Connected to this PC tab