On PC + Linux, you can have an uncountable number of combinations of hardware. CPUs, GPUs, RAM, USB devices, displays, and much more. Pair in your choice of Linux distro, kernel, desktop environment, and packages, and who knows what issues support will get.
“mostly” is the important word. Roblox’s customer support would need to be ready to deal with literally anything that can go wrong with a Linux install. Even with tools like Flatpak, it is no guarantee a random distro will be completely fine. I’ve had some funky stuff happen just from switching distros or even desktop environments.
That is a really bad assumption to make into the future.
Ignoring the fact that its based on Gentoo, afaik ChromeOS users run the Android version of Roblox, straight up. Im not familiar with how this is accomplished on the system, but I am curious as to how this is handled from a support standpoint and how this differs from running roblox through wine.
Why not leave the experience of developers to the developers? As I have stated above, unofficial patches will eventually get better. Furthermore, I doubt that developers on Linux will complain much about the lack of stability on Linux - as a majority of them are aware that Linux patches are just hacky solutions not intended to provide a proper setup.
If a developer is brave enough to make the jump to Linux and continue using it, it would make sense for them to get accustomed to lack of officially supported programs and set their expectations right.
EDIT: I do agree official support would be highly unlikely, considering the ratio of the amount of effort to be invested to the amount of probable return is low. The goal of an anti-cheat should be to minimize the amount of total cheaters, usually by eliminating the mass - not to attempt to remove cheating altogether. Hampering Linux users by actively blocking wine is not the way to do this.
I believe this message paints an unfair picture for the Linux community.
It’s not just hundreds or thousands of people who play Roblox on Linux, it’s hundreds of thousands. Grapejuice is the most famous solution to run Roblox on Linux, and it has 200,000 downloads on flathub, which is just one of the places where grapejuice can be downloaded.
Also, most people who use Linux only use Linux, not other operating systems. I personally know at least 20 people who use Linux, and half of them don’t even have a virtual machine. Many people prefer Linux for reasons other than being “technical”, such as security, being free and mainly the lightness of the system compared to any other.
About native Linux support, many people are against it because it needs to support several distros, but nowadays we have flatpaks packages, which are practically universal packages that work in any Linux distribution. Most of the applications I currently use are flatpaks.
Roblox never made anything for Linux, but the community always created new tools to provide the possibility to play. I’m honestly very disappointed that they explicitly blocked even community support.
You know that there are more good people which want to help the FOSS be even better and more secure than people which only intentions are to cause harm?
To clarify one detail: while we have no plans to release a Linux client, we are aiming to support Wine again. It seems possible, and we see a lot of value in it as a way of letting people run on Linux without the large investment on our end of releasing a native client. For all the reasons described above, Wine won’t ever be something that we guarantee will work, but also for all the reasons described above, we’d really like to make it work.
That’s just awesome to hear, but can you give us a very rough estimate of when this might happen if possible? It’s ok if not though since just knowing that this is something Roblox is considering and planning for is honestly more than what I expected and it makes me and probably everyone here more than happy
Some of which - not so. For example, the amount of CPUs and RAM are limited depending on which Windows edition license you’re using. One of the reasons there are practically no supercomputers are running Windows - and almost no large scale servers run Windows also.
In enterprise, it isn’t a question of what you can work on, but what you prioritize. Adding more people does not always make projects go faster. Adding proper Linux support (the focus of this post, not WINE support) is the equivalent of a new platform, which would satisfy <1 million people. Picking a platform like the Meta Quest 2 or PlayStation 5 would give you many times the benefit. A native Linux version won’t be able to be prioritized until Linux has the same type of market share that macOS does. WINE, on the other hand (not the point of this post), is a lot less work and could be a practical option.
Worth has nothing to do with how much money they have. Roblox actually loses money every year, but their stock value is worth billions. Also, as other users have stated, it isn’t entirely about the technically ability, but if it’s worth it.
As the user above me stated, they could get way more users by supporting PS5 as opposed to Linux.
On top of that, Roblox has already stated they plan to try and support Wine, which would be nice for Linux Users.
Does ROBLOX Studio at least work on linux? I never really play games on ROBLOX anymore and 100% of my activity is building static showcases in Studio. I heard the game client doesn’t even work in virtual machines anymore either, but does this also apply to Studio as well?
So while I was reading a blog post made by the developers of a Linux distribution called “Endless OS”, I stumbled upon a very interesting statement:
We have a tool called eos-gates that intercepts users trying to run Windows software or install deb or RPM packages, and (where possible) guides them to the same app, or an equivalent, on Flathub. At the time of writing, by a very wide margin, the most popular Windows app our users try to install is Roblox. Sadly we can’t really recommend a straightforward way to install that particular game, but this data has helped us to find other apps that we should add to the mapping.
It looks like Roblox is a lot more popular on the Linux ecosystem than what I initially thought. Although this distribution in particular has a very small scale, it still shows that the interest and demand for Roblox on Linux is there. Due to the nature of the Linux desktop, the amount of data available on user behaviours is very limited (although that’s slowlychanging), so I’m left wondering if this trend can be observed in other distros. I do notice the name “Roblox” being thrown around Linux forums and communities every so often, but that’s just anecdotal evidence; this data, as small as it is, is far more interesting.
In any case, I still believe that Linux compatibility is at least worth considering, and small pieces of data like this one are further cementing my opinion. I think it’s fair to say that Roblox has an unnatural amount of popularity in the Linux ecosystem, far beyond the interest in other desktop platforms. This interest might be enough to offset the Linux desktop’s relatively small userbase.
That’s excluding the share of developers that use Linux though.
Almost everyone I know who uses Linux is a developer, Developers are worth FAR more to ROBLOX than players.
Vinegar has been updated to be able to play Roblox again!
I’m not sure how they did it - it could be modifying the client to bypass the check or just remove the check, regardless it’s finally working!
You can read this article here to see how to get it working - its basically just installing vinegar and running a command to swap to the correct branch
It’s still in testing, and no official announcement has been made, but it was kinda “announced” here
I’ve been running it for a while now and it has a few quirks and glitches, but it works!
Playing “a dream you’ve had before” was a hog when running with Vinegar
Even though its the only way to play Roblox on Linux, doesn’t mean it’s perfect - I kept experiencing heavy lag and de loads every few minutes on minimum graphics even though playing on windows is just fine on max graphics (I dual boot)
It would definitely be preferable to have a native version, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen unless Linux desktop market share seriously skyrockets (as most of this topic already points out)
I only made a post on this topic to spread the news, even if it’s not preferable. Better than waydroid.
No one is going to play Roblox on a supercomputer though. I bet 99.9% of people that would be using the Linux version of Roblox have pretty standard PC configurations.
