I used Linux to play my music collection for a while, but it just had too many problems with crashing and randomly needing to regenerate its index. Windows Media Player just works.
The original WMP was pretty good! But you really can no longer get anything like it. ETA: at least under active development. WMP Classic was a suitable replacement I used to use: https://mpc-hc.org/
Full disclosure: for music I still run Winamp 2.95, and for video it is a mix of Kodi for set top boxes and VLC for PC/Mobile.
iTunes is dead although its replacements aren't much better.
"Modern" Ubuntu is absolutely rock solid as my work machine, the current iteration of the windows media player is total rubbish compared to VLC which does actually work with just about everything.
Interestingly, this Linux box is the first machine I've had with which the suspend actually works reliably, unlike every windows machine I've used.
BTW, the music players on Roku, Grace Digital's streaming boxes, and Galaxy Audio's streaming boxes, are all unusable. The only ones that ever worked were the Turtle Beach Audiotron (now obsolete), and Windows Media Player.
I also have an Ubuntu desktop machine. It started pestering me to upgrade to a newer Ubuntu, and I finally relented and did. The new Ubuntu simply would not function with my graphics card. The old one worked fine with it. I spent a whole day trying to figure that one out, but there was no solution other than wiping the disk and reinstalling the older Ubuntu. A proper desktop replacement would:
1. warn me that I needed a new graphics card when pestering me to upgrade
2. refuse to install if I had a graphics card that was abandoned
If that was your issue, there's scripts that patch support for newer distros into the old drivers.
If there are scripts that fix it, those scripts should be run automatically by the installer. Otherwise, it's just not a desktop replacement. I'm sorry to have to say this, but to call it a desktop replacement means it has to:
1. just work
2. failing that, detect the problem and explain what to do. Crashing is just not acceptable anymore.
I do support all the time for the D compilers. In my experience, if the install does anything but "just work", you immediately lose 50-90% of your users.
Every error path in the installer needs to be gone over and engineered to "just work". Messages like:
"Unknown Error: TXerr 66x53 failed, aborted"
are so 1980's :-/
I remember I had to do some hackery on a driver to get my sister's printer to work with her macbook/OSX.
I've had all sorts of issues with printers/scanners/random software combinations/drivers/failed automatic update crash loops(!)/etc with Windows.
The only operating systems that might meet the criteria are on tablets and phones (which are obviously not desktops) -- and even then I've had to cross-compile a kernel module to support a wifi adapter w/ USB OTG.
Whichever music player didn't work for you here, there are dozens of others that might.
Funkwhale, Jellyfin, and the dozen Subsonic forks/clones are better than whatever desktop music managers exist, and they have cross-platform clients so you can access your collection on your FireTV or phone.
There's no real reason to run any of them on Linux, though, since they're just web apps. Jellyfin and some others are written in C# using .NET Core, so they'd probably be more stable on Windows, anyway.
1. here's the directory with my music files in it
2. shuffle play it.
That's it. This is not rocket science. I appear to be a unique snowflake, or somebody on the WMP team is just like me. Because that just causes every other music player to commit seppuku.
Also, there are other Linux media players that focus more specifically on music:
- Lollypop (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Lollypop): GTK-based
- Elisa (https://elisa.kde.org): Qt-based
- Vvave (https://vvave.kde.org): Qt-based, mobile-first