Hey @koksg,
Fair enough on the word itself - I wear it without complaint, S/370 JCL and all. Old school is the right room to be in. Completely OFT.
But let me push back on the framing, because the premise that the Volumio products user is being deprioritised in favour of “RPi enthusiasts” does not survive contact with how the system is actually built.
There is one codebase. The Volumio products - Rivo, Primo, Integro, Motivo - and the DIY builds run the same volumio3-backend, the same UI, the same plugin architecture, on top of the same Bookworm base. They differ in board files, kernel, and signed hardware profiles, not in the application layer. When the playback chain, the library handling, the buffering, the ALSA output path get worked on, that work lands on your device by definition. There is no separate “hobbyist” track absorbing effort that would otherwise go to you. The transport quality you care about - clean bit-perfect delivery down the chain - is exactly the shared core.
On the features you call side dishes:
CD, BT, NVMe, extra DAC support - none of these are mandatory and none cost you signal quality. They are modular. If your Rivo never mounts an NVMe or pairs a Bluetooth sink, those code paths are dormant. They do not sit in the audio pipeline. A streamer whose job is to pass the best digital signal to the next device is not degraded by the existence of a CD module it never loads.
On the app and UI:
This is your one genuinely technical point and it is legitimate. Scroll stutter, search latency, navigation that forces you out and back - those are real, measurable, reproducible regressions, not taste. But “looks dated” and “feels slow” are two different reports. The first is design opinion. The second is a defect that can be logged, traced, and fixed - if it is filed as such.
The UI and app you are describing on a Volumio product is the same MyVolumio interface across the range, so if you can give me your exact device, the Volumio version, and one specific action that stutters or lags - library scroll, service search, menu transition - I can treat it as a performance problem with an actual cause rather than a vibe. That is the difference between “looks dated,” which is design opinion I cannot action, and “scrolling a large library drops frames on my device running version X,” which I can take to the people who own that code path.
Music first - agreed, completely. The kernels and overlays exist so that the music arrives intact. That is the whole point of the nerdery.
Kind Regards,
@volumio - there is plenty of good details here as well as frustration.
