audacious VS projectm

I usually just use mpv since it's the simplest and most flexible. You might be looking for something like Audacious though, which is great too

Audacious is a more popular media player app that supports Winamp skins and a media library.

This may interest you,and it is Qt,plus can be used with MPD. https://audacious-media-player.org/

the new version of audacious has a vu meter and its also available to windows https://audacious-media-player.org/

Audacious audio player.

Find a GUI player you like (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications#Graphical_13 for a non-exhaustive list; ISTR Audacious being mentioned as a Winamp clone) and add it to your autostart items (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Autostarting#On_desktop_environment_startup).

Yes, Winamp works well on Linux through wine, I have been using it for a long time myself. Although recently I have also been using audacious, which runs more smoothly and is better integrated with Linux (as it is a native application) and it also has support for Winamp skins, so it's a fairly good drop-in replacement (as long as you're not relying on some esoteric plugins or file formats).

im not the parent commenter but i highly recommend audacious for linux and windows. plays every audio format you have, doesn’t enforce a specific music library folder structure, and supports winamp skins(!) https://audacious-media-player.org/

Effectively succeeded by Audacious:

https://audacious-media-player.org/

... which is under active development/maintenance.

In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, what's the deal with binary symlinking not working? Example, the ProjectM visualizer I downloaded and moved to a more static directory. It runs fine in that directory but when I symlink it via KDE's Dolphin by drag/dropping to my desktop, it does nothing. Same when I try to make a shortcut in KDE's application launcher. Why is it so to be like that for when you do it to get your shortcut?

I think this is the spiritual successor to Winamp's visualiser, ProjectM:

https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm

If you're referring this this ProjectM, then it looks like Steam might be the best option.

It can also be used standalone from this github

Here you go, open-source, stand-alone version of the winamp visualiser: https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm

You might give Milkdrop a try. It started as a Winamp visualization plugin. It has its own scripting language and a ton of presets you can poke at to figure out how things work. I'm not sure what state Winamp is in these days, but Milkdrop has been ported to work as a Foobar2000 plugin called ProjectM. It looks like there's also a standalone version now, too: https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm