Roon GUI on Linux? [Answered]

Glad you got up and running. My use case is to drive a headphone amp/dac from a Linux desktop device and for this the Community Remote works very well, allowing me to get rid of Windows on this machine. Any limitations are governed by the Roon API and I have adjusted to the functionality it offers. Everyone’s needs differ tho and I am pleased you have a solution that works under Linux.

If I may, this is not a proper answer as you are here considering all usage. I wonder if linux users don’t represent a higher mix of roon customers. But anyway, after looking around where to put my remarks I will revive this post as this a bit of a problem. When you are a linux user, you get no solution and this is an issue.

  • Despite a good automatic linking process for a complete CD to the corresponding data, the process of linking a sigle track to the album data is sometimes not working. In this case, the usage of the semi-manual process is required. It’s not directly working out of the box (grouping and ungrouping) => make it more user friendly to select and finalize

  • Manually linking a track / album to data is only possible under windows (or Apple I guess). But I have none of them and would appreciate to have the possibility to link whatever musics I add to data (at least artwork) [@Jan_Koudijs does an amazing job with his Comunity Remote. If only you could make available the API to make those modification under linux, it would be a great solution for those, like me, who are unable / don’t want to have a windows OS PC for this purpose only]

  • nice + : allowing to see when played what playlists a track is part of … and allowing to unselect it from one or more playlist (usage example : I have a playlist I use in my car which is constituted of musics with a low dynamic so as to hear it properly in a noisy environment and sometimes, I misjudged a track and wish to suppress it from the playlist. But I then have to go in the playlist, find the track and then remove it)

As a conclusion, I would like to have the same ability with my android phone or my linux based computer I have with a windows PC. I heard that it is possible with a tablet and don’t get why it’s not with a smartphone. It would be very useful for point 1 and 2. Just to let you know, I tried to reuse an old nexus 9 … but have been blocked to 1.8 legacy version only, which is not compatible with the installed 2.0 roon core :sob:

Ending with a positive feedback : with Roon and roon ARC, I have a consistent tool to listen everywhere an everyday increasing music collection and … enjoy it !

Simple. Screen real estate is the limiting factor.

I’m not going to repeat the same old arguments here – I’ve been running Linux since the mid-1990s – but you can run the Windows app successfully on Linux. I tend to use this only when I need the additional functionality unavailable on my phone. It is stable, and easy to install.

These instructions also work with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS – just substitute oracular for noble – and most likely earlier LTS, too.


IDK whether Roon thinks there is a large enough user base to warrant a dedicated Linux GUI. However, I think it is unlikely while Roon runs on .Net, so we may have to wait and see if a new development stack is used in the future (ARC doesn’t use .Net).

But even then, I can only see them supporting, say Ubuntu-based distributions running Wayland, as there are simply too many flavours to provide support for all. I don’t think Flatpak is an option either, unless they decouple the GUI and server, which seems unlikely.

Could also be lower. Nobody knows, but Roon users on the forum by and large are not to the most techy type. I understand your desire, I have used Linux since ~1994 and hoped for Linux GUIs for this and that, but we have all become used to running Wine occasionally, and that’s part of making the Linux choice.

Isn’t Roon using some very special custom graphics library for the UI, so if Roon Labs could get it running under .Net on Windows and Mac, they could, theoretically, port it to at least some Linux flavors. In practice it is of course highly unlikely – I’ve been hearing about the “next year” being when Linux takes over the desktop since mid-90s, too. It’s just too minuscule a market. And a good portion of Roon’s target audience seems to be people buying audiophile cables, not ones messing with getting Linux to run.

Yes, I believe so.

Packaging a Linux version probably doesn’t make sense, certainly with the current UI, which must be getting long in the tooth nowadays.

I’m not holding my breath for a Linux app, and I think my last post turned out too optimistic.

We’ll never know, really, without knowing how good (or bad) their UI framework is and how portable it is.

Given that all the hard stuff (server and bridge) already runs on Linux, and only the UI is missing, assuming some sane architecture of the client (i.e. it uses some kind of MVVM/MVC/MVP separation of logic from presentation) it shouldn’t be too much of a lift to redo it in, say, Avalonia (don’t do Uno though, just… don’t! :slight_smile: ), and have it run on all the platforms it runs on now as well as pretty much any sane Linux distro

Of course depending on how invested (emotionally) Roon Labs are into their UI framework and how much do they want to keep appearance exactly the same as it is now, it might be a complete non-starter.

The other issue of course is that even if they do provide something that does run on Linux, what kind of support load would it be for when someone manages to sideload it onto a 10 years old Bluesound Node or something equally inappropriate and then asks for support because it does not work quite right.

@mjw Thanks a lot for the complete command line. So far, I saw this possibility exists but I never tried it given the numerous issues I read about, the necessary several layers (wine, winetricks, not understanding why a 32 bits version would be the solution and being frighten about having numerous files everywhere on my computer for a possibly non working nor stable solution at the end (should I use wine 10 instead of 9 ?). As you confirm it work well ? I may give it a try if there is no other solution.

About possible impact on prospects, let me tell you a situation I experienced repeatably : One week ago, I was with a friend and he wanted to listen to a few tracks. So we did. Looking at the GUI, he asked me about the app. I showed him a bit and when the selected tracks ended, roon came on one of the track which is not linked with data and artwork… and all of a sudden looked poor. It changed his perception and re-positioned roon as “any other music app” and he didn’t understand that I couldn’t correct it easily (I told you, I don’t have a resident windows based PC). I can understand the reasons why roon remote is not available on linux … but not that those features are not available on smartphones or through API so as to let Community Remote solve the issue.

Once again, roon core is very efficient and works flawless on my linux server, but these limitation / imperfection make roon concept difficult to stand out. For numerous people, roon competitors are not other stand alone music apps but music distribution app (spotify, apple musics, …). Roon propose a different approach : you don’t rent your music, you own it (is there any roon subscriber who ONLY uses music from streaming platform ?). Roon experience should be : save a track or a folder in the roon zone and get it instantaneously nice. Otherwise subscribing a music provider shines brighter…

Since Roon will use a unique Wine prefix, it is, for all intents, similar to a Flatpak or Snap app. I have tweaked my installation, changing WIN_ROON_DIR=my_roon_instance, so Roon is installed in ~/.roon-on-wine

The only minor issues I currently have are:

  1. CPU usage is higher than native Linux apps (this is a Windows inefficiency thing rather than the problem a couple of years ago where some CPU cores maxed out.) On my laptop, the fan starts when Roon is running, but it’s no issue on a PC.
  2. When opening Roon, the window isn’t always set to maximum size.
  3. Audio output doesn’t work on the host without installing the native Linux Roon Bridge package.

I prefer this approach over Bottles because Bottles is displayed in the panel when Roon is running. So, even when there’s a Roon startup icon, it will never display an app indicator.

Incidentally, I use Wayland.

if I may before trying : why roon implementation on top of wine is 32bits ? Is it therefore an up-to-date interface (i.e. evolving / maintained) or is it like putting plaster on a wooden leg ?

Who says that it is? There may exist some older posts about that (maybe even including some by me) because for a long time it was the general Wine recommendation that 32-bit tends to work better with Wine libraries, but I’m pretty sure that Roon works with 64 bits. (Is there even a 32 bit Roon installer for Windows still?)

Not that it matters, the only difference between 32 and 64 bit is the addressable memory space.

There is no more 32-bit version of Roon for Windows available.
Windows itself is still dual-stack 32-bit and 64-bit. So Wine also needs to be. Therefore Wine may complain if 32-bit support is missing (not installed).

thanks for your answer. Sorry, I may be wrong but I understand wine32:i386 and --add-architecture i386 as talking about 32 bits version. If I am wrong, that’s perfect.

These are official recommendations for installing Wine (from WineHQ) for the reasons I already described above.

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Attemping to install Wine with 32-bit support may be possible, but with APT on those versions of Ubuntu, you’ll run into all sorts of dependency problems.

Whilst Roon is 64-bit, you’ll find that many Windows applications still depend on the odd 32-bit DLL. Thus, the recommendation.

Sorry I got misunderstood.

  • Should I use wine10 (instead of 9) ?
  • wine32 and i386 are not selecting 32bits version ?

If you all use it like this, I’ll give it a go.

Thanks all for your replies and comments :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

Just install Roon on Wine as I describe in the linked post, and don’t sweat the 32-bit part, as it won’t be used. It’s simply a dependency that needs fulfilling.

Likewise, don’t worry about the Wine version, as the instructions are to install and maintain the latest version of winehq-stable (it was version 9.x when I wrote.) I opted for WineHQ over that distributed with Ubuntu because it takes a while for upstream changes to appear in the Ubuntu repository.

I’ve just done a clean OpenSUSE Tumbleweed installation on my little Lenovo laptop.
After Linux itself I’ve installed Lutris. Lutris itself downloads all the relevant Wine / Windows parts.

Installed Roon through Lutris and it runs great out of the box. Only issue is that Lutris doesn´t recognize the Roon executable. So I had to manually browse to it in the launchers settings.
But here we go :slight_smile:

P.S.
When installing Roon Lutris will automatically download Proton as well to get it all working.