Since I’ve been a Roon user, there have been requests to run Roon Core in various Unix environments including FreeBSD, TrueNAS (FreeBSD), and Linux, usually Debian or Ubuntu. Until now, this meant separate ports for BSD and Linux but with FreeBSD 12 and FLATPAK, it may indeed be feasible to make a single version of Roon Core that will run in most Linux environments and the newer. FreeBSD 12 and later environments.
With FreeBSD 12, the Linux compatibility suite has become mature and can be added to TrueNAS or FreeBSD. This environment allows FreeBSD to serve Linux system calls. My understanding is that most Linux application images can be run successfully in this environment.
The second thing that has happened is that Linux package management is under revision with FLATPAK and SNAP packaging aiming to solve the problem of packaging an application with its dependencies so that a the package can be loaded and executed in a sandbox that restricts its view of the host resources. This sandbox environment sounds a lot like a FreeBSD jail which provided a lightweight OS environment and restricted resources to the processes running in the jail.
So, the question for RoonLabs to kick around: can we move our Linux executables to FLATPAK or SNAP so Roon can be run in “non-traditional environments”? Does it make sense to move the product to FLATPAK or SNAP for distribution to the OEM licensees? If so, can we make the packages available to our end-user licensees? How would the CODEC libraries be handled? Probably an end user command to pull them from a repository and add them. That is the situation today.