By “homeless” I’m going to assume you’re referring to Roblox’s latest Wine block. While it is impossible to stabilize a continuous player base with constant blocks, the Vinegar survey in question was carried out during a period in which it was possible to estimate +/- how many Linux players Roblox has, because during that time, participants were not “homeless”.
Vinegar developers could have at least put a one-time survey popup on startup to get a more accurate number. Or an opt-in telemetry setting to detect how many different users use Vinegar every day, but that would probably be difficult to do on a small project.
People who set out to use operating systems with ~4% desktop market share probably understand the basics of what they’re doing with it. Which means they will know how to run Roblox on Linux, an operating system that they should have reasonable knowledge of. There are infinite ways to run Roblox on Linux, not necessarily with bootstrappers. You can use Bottles or any other program that makes Wine management easier. You could run raw Roblox player without many issues with Wine or Proton, or even run Windows Roblox bootstrappers like Bloxstrap (my favorite method), or just run Vinegar itself. Searching Roblox on Flathub makes Vinegar appear as an option as well.
On Linux, users generally do not need tutorials to install simple programs, such as Firefox, which is available in distribution repositories, Flathub, etc., but in a specific case such as Roblox, searching on YouTube is also possible, and many updated videos appear teaching how.
Official support is not necessary to get an idea of how many players Roblox has on Linux. The Vinegar survey is an example. Any future survey they do is another one. If we consider that Linux has a desktop market share of ~4%, and user agents are rarely changed (unless they use LibreWolf or configure Firefox to use privacy.resistFingerprint to change, among them, the user agent to Windows, which is rare), and these people within this percentage use Linux on their desktop for various things, such as studying, watching YouTube, working, gaming, and if we consider that the world’s population is 8 billion, and only 60 million people are interested in Roblox daily on supported platforms, then imagine on Linux. It’s really something very niche.
The best short-term solution that Roblox engineers could do for Linux is to compile Roblox Android for x86_64 if it is feasible and run it through Waydroid. Probably better than QEMU, architecture translation libraries and other black magic.
I guess saying “homeless” made the wrong impression. What I really meant was that a mix of blocks by Roblox and all the different choices available for running Roblox on Linux when it’s not blocked scatters the people interested in the subject in a way that causes the statistic agency (the Vinegar survey in this case) to be an extremely unreliable source for even estimating a number regarding the topic. Many people who are interested just won’t use Roblox on Linux in the first place because of how unreliable the blocks are, scattering people even further and making estimates even more unrealistic.
homeless really meant the people that are invisible to the agency in this case.
Also, in terms of short-term solutions, they’re already out as they have explained before. Only hope left is to wait until PROPER support is feasible. Until then, all we can do is pull up different data to try and prove an actual estimate.
with the recent developments of Microsoft Windows 10 and Windows 11, it has made me want to move to Linux completely however as a Roblox developer this is somewhat difficult to do
I would truly appreciate Linux support
i do not blame you for wanting to switch, but being hesitant to do so
recently i made the switch myself but kept my old windows install on another drive for development
right now the only solution seems to be dual booting, if you can afford another drive (vms might work but i havent managed to get one to work just yet, if i do ill come back and edit this)
word of warning to those jumping ship with a nvidia card
please please please save yourself the headache, do not download official nvidia drivers. they are horrible and perform worse than the generic drivers each distro comes bundled with usually
Would it be possible to use Docker? Seems like an interesting idea
Some Roblox on Linux bootstrappers already support Studio, as Hyperion isn’t implemented into Studio and will never be implemented, you can use GitHub - vinegarhq/vinegar: An open-source, minimal, configurable, fast bootstrapper for running Roblox on Linux. for this.
Docker as in to use Linux on Windows? Don’t do it, it is a waste of time and I am unsure how you would utilise a desktop Linux environment inside of Docker.
Either, switch to Linux and use a virtual machine to play Roblox (which will require you to have two GPUs connected to your system) or simply dual boot swapping in between Windows and Linux.
What distribution are you using? Official drivers work really well even with it’s hiccups, generic drivers are inefficient and sometimes will not provide support for specific rendering APIs.
Please read this from another thread:
Also read: https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/24275616578708-Hyperion-Messages
The windows drivers for my laptop barely work but I’m stuck on Windows 10 because of this
The iGPU runs at 50% of the speed as it does on linux (it even has a bug where it doesnt turbo under windows) which is infuriating for many reasons. Im not shilling out 60 dollars for a ThinkPad motherboard with the better dGPU just because of ROBLOX. This is not cool.
I’ve currently got a dual boot setup for Roblox, the Windows install im using is barely functional, because it wasn’t built from the OEM, but it works. Vinegar is mostly usable for Studio’s sake, but I obviously cant use the client under Linux.
Its a good workaround for now, but I’m hoping we do get proper Roblox support so I can just ditch this 128GB parasite of a partition on my harddrive.
Windows 10 is going EOL soon
Every non-tech savvy person i know (who are very technologically illiterate) has HATED 11
My mother’s job moved to 11 and there has been nothing but problems at her workplace
She and everyone of her co-workers hates 11 and wishes the company never moved
Both of my tech illiterate parents are staying on 10 on their personal computers
“Objects in mirror are closer than what they appear.”
Just an android emulator from the looks of it?
It’s not an android emulator, its a wrapper that implements the very few missing functions the android app uses
wait what i had no idea this existed, tysm!
my good sir thank you for telling me about this,
how can i be certain around the safety of this?
can’t, its closed source
if you mean not getting banned most android emulators dont get banned
if you mean getting hacked the person is trustworthy
both of those mean nothing though since its closed source.
I’ve made a cursory review of the binary code a few releases ago and I wasn’t able to find any proof of a backdoor. Nevertheless, I’d still advice caution due to recent troubles internally in VinegarHQ/Sober’s community. It’s probably safe, but the optics are awful. You should use 2fa to minimize the amount of potential damage.
As for the security of your system, Sober is a Flatpak and has no permissions which can harm your system (it can’t access any of your files for example), so it should be fine.