I’ve been apart of this debate since 2013. it is beyond time for roblox to natively support linux.
The whole argument was the lack of unity between package managers back in the day, yet this was quite easily fixed with the dozens of package managers that work between distros. Most of them now natively support snap, which makes this argument a redundant point.
The argument now? Exploiting.
Roblox has such a massive exploiting problem that they acquired a firm and directly integrated it into the client. This would not have been an issue if they hadn’t had deliberately un-patched the patch that went into WINE in order to make the client run with the prior anticheat. To the knowledge that was shared, this was because it couldn’t access a certain translation layer component up until the creator of one of the largest (now patched) exploits teased it in his discord server, but refused to name the component until one of us, here on the devforum revealed it was a compontent not accessible in WINE.
Roblox sees linux as more of a vulnerable platform yet seems to not crack down swiftly on clients like Swift, which again, exclusively run on windows. Their idea is killing the market before it even exists.
There is no valuable or even reasonable argument for them not to support linux, they just don’t want to hire and dedicate themselves to maintaining it.
tbf what ive learned most about switching to linux from windows is that linux is actually way more secure than windows and is on the same level as macOS
Not financially viable for Roblox sadly, not enough current marketshare as it usually goes. I believe they would also have to learn the Linux ecosystem and how it functions in order to do a proper secure port of Hyperion.
A lot of things have changed since this thread has been posted. Linux has been an industry standard for servers for over 2 decades now and there’s been an insane growth on desktop users as well.
Last year it was estimated that over 4% of desktops run on Linux. If we’re talking developers than that number raises to a staggering 26% (Stack Overflow Developer Survey, some other surveys conclude up to 50%) That means at least 1 in 4 developers have to dual boot Windows or have another desktop just for Roblox
Linux driver support has improved significantly in recent years, especially for GPUs. Companies like NVIDIA and AMD now provide robust drivers, and open-source alternatives like Mesa have made so much progress.
I think it’s time to seriously consider Linux support.
Sober is just a terrible band-aid closed-source solution managed by immature/informal (for lack of a better word) developers, more of a hobbyist project than a resource. It’s a client based off of the x86-64 architecture binaries for Android devices which not to mention runs horribly but also has no support for Roblox Studio client which is what most of the users are interested in.
No serious developer in their right mind is using Sober, when it comes to the workspace everyone wants to work with stable/reliable/supported tools and definitely not some unstable shady closed-source project (which I am unsure if it’s ToS abiding let alone the hundreds of other concerns that I would’ve had if I were to be using it if it supported studio).
This is a very weird statement to make, Roblox spent millions only a few years ago porting React to Roblox although QT worked fine. Is upgrading technology although it “works fine” a bad investment? There were multiple benefits of them porting Roact such as being able to hire React developers, having more structured code to work, easier to work with contractors due its modularity etc… Similar benefits will be reaped from supporting Linux, granted not as lucrative as Roact was (from an investment perspective). I’d say we’re at a point that it’s not a matter of “if” but a matter of “when”, there’s really no excuses to not supporting Linux at this point.
I have been using different subsystems for years trying to come up with a decent client alternative for the usecase of being on linux. These aren’t mature enough, nor are they ever going to be at-par with roblox running on WINE or another binary system. Sober will never be mature enough to run smoothly on decent hardware due to the inherent limitations of virtualization
people won’t move to linux because companies don’t care about linux, and companies don’t care about linux because people don’t use it. also roblox is a multibillion company btw
its 2025 and even with the steam deck (steam deck uses SteamOS, which is a linux distro) and the millions of people switching to linux because microsoft likes to put bloatware and spyware (recall is a great example of windows spyware) in windows 11 (windows 10 support is ending this year btw) roblox still won’t make a native linux client… sigh.
well since roblox won’t make a linux version, atleast sober (custom roblox community-made client for linux) and vinegar (roblox studio community-made linux client, which uses wine for running windows programs) work fine for me. but i had to use proton (a wine fork, which is focused on gaming) to get better performance and to fix the studio camera.
Have you actually tried using Sober? It does not use virtualization. It runs the Roblox Android app pretty much natively by implementing the required Android APIs on Linux without any inefficiencies. The performance is better than it ever was on Wine, and often it even performs better than the Windows app due to the Android version being better optimized to run on weak devices. If you tried it and got bad performance it might have been caused by your graphics drivers being broken.
This isn’t really a valid point, it’s similar to Mac with how Unix works and I’m sure plenty of engineers would know how to, somebody higher up is probably just refusing to greenlight the project.
This is also not true (why is there so much misinformation in this thread?). Most apps nowadays work on Linux fine and if not you can just use Wine. Roblox is the sole app I have any problems with because Studio does not work anymore and Sober is a bit finicky sometimes.
Every professional app (namely adobe) has Linux counterparts, like GIMP, Davinci Resolve, etc.
Flatpak causes more problems than it solves for me, something is always broken.
For example, Sober breaks all of KDE’s effects (blurring, rounding, animations, …) LibreOffice didn’t have any working themes, and Brave would always freeze. None of those issues happened in their native counterpart apps.
