The Linux work is pretty much done, and has been for a while, but we can’t release it until the RoonSpeakers software packages are ready, because unlike the other platforms, Roon on Linux never had a “built-in” audio stack of its own–it only knows how to talk to RoonSpeakers + other networked endpoints.
We decided to do something a little bit more ambitious than initially planned with RoonSpeakers–the new audio stack that we’ve developed for RoonSpeakers is going to replace the existing audio components on all of our supported platforms. From a practical standpoint, this enables new RoonSpeakers functionality like synchronized playback, digital volume, and a few other improvements to work for local outputs, too. It also guarantees a consistency in behavior across a wide range of configurations.
It was inevitable that this would happen eventually, the change in plans is that we decided to do it all at once instead of phasing it out over several months. We feel that some of the intermediate states during the phase-out would lead to a lot of confusion and artificial limitations, which would be difficult to explain and more difficult to support.
This more-ambitious piece of RoonSpeakers work is under active development right now, in parallel with supporting a bunch of manufacturers doing integrations of their own. Once that stuff is releasable, we will release RoonSpeakers+Linux together.