Multi-room Audio?

OK, how exactly does multi-room audio work? I have two players setup (both raspberry pi, just for testing). Each is on the local network, I can access and play music through both, no problem. But there’s no real way to link them or play the same thing on the two zones, they’re just completely independent zones. I don’t really see the benefit of having every single zone playing something different and all controlled separately. I’m desparately hoping to replace my Sonos setup (6 zones) with something that’s NOT Sonos, since they’re absolute d-bags. Am I missing something, can I not just link two zones together?

Additionally, it seems very strange that if I have 6 zones and want to add a plugin or change the appearance, I’d have to do that for ALL the zones. Is there a way to just copy the appearance or settings across all your ‘players’?

Update: I did a bit more research and it seems the functionality I want isn’t really there. It requires snapcast, and switching between the apps. That seems kinda silly and cumbersome. The myvolumio says they’re working on linked zones, but that was at least a year ago without any updates.

Here’s another question, can I just use the snapcast plugin to ‘permanently’ link two zones together? Basically, I have my media room and a family room very close together and sometimes we link these together to listen to music in both. But the media room stuff isn’t always turned on, so if we just always play music in one room, it’s easy enough to control which room is actually playing and we would never really play anything DIFFERENT between the two zones, so they could be permanently linked. Thoughts?

Yes.
I have a device I use as base (snapserver) and then three other zones (snapclients). Sometimes they are all on, sometimes just one but the audio from the snapserver always comes through.
(What I don’t seem to be able to do is get the spofity audio from base to come through on the others which is why I’ve been looking through this forum)

Thanks for the reply! How to you control the zones? Do you need to switch into the Snapcast app and control the zone linking through there? If this doesn’t work with spotify, then it’s a bit of a deal-breaker for me unfortunately, I’ll follow along with your other thread.