Proper support for the Linux platform

[codes4breakfast (Lucas)]

@shayner32

The only thing that would benefit from having linux support would be exploiting the game – just look at CSGO.

I just want to remark here that you can play Roblox from the command line in all supported OSes and that does not instantly mean I can exploit it. In order to exploit a game, you need to edit its memory/manipulate its network requests/do other low-level stuff and that is possible in all systems, given the tools are available.

For games like CS:GO, there are specialized third-parties that carefully design their cheats around known vulnerabilities in the VAC system, which are kept really secured by Valve, and the situation is not much different from Roblox: there is a whole forum dedicated to exploiting Roblox that is pretty much known by every developer/staff member nowadays.

Of course, Linux does provide some extra low-level tools so you can tweak the system as you wish, but most of the time the cheaters you see in games are using Windows. Today’s serious exploits are cross-platform, ya know??

Lastly, Windows and its backbones are not exactly “secure”, because, differently from open-source community initiatives, the only security patches you’ll get are from Microsoft (which usually take a long time to be assembled, distributed and installed). That opens a door not only for malware but for exploiting tools too, allowing them to manipulate system resources that applications use.

tl;dr: Tagging Linux as an exploiting tool and disregarding other systems in that capability is not a valid argument.

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I was a Linux user for about a year and half, and something I definitely missed in this was proper support for games. I don’t think Roblox will be ever supporting Linux, though, and the reasons stated by the employees are pretty much valid. The enormous amount of distros, each with their own different systems doesn’t help either.

@Tiffblocks

There are a large number of Debian users, who have 3 years out of date graphics drivers on top of the drivers being buggy. These users would blame us for any problems they run into, not their bad distribution.

Roblox still annoys me whenever I am running outdated drivers on Windows, but I’d rather update them anyways since it is really easy to do that in Windows. I see the issue in Linux, though. Drivers were, as many said before, a pain to install and maintain.

The platform already shadowbans games in mobile platforms when they run too poorly, but the public that uses those devices are generally younger and will in fact blame Roblox for it. I don’t see Linux being used by such a public though (other than in schools, which most certainly wouldn’t allow their students to play games like so). Because of the complexity of the system, I wouldn’t expect someone who’s not a geek or a tech-savvy using Debian/Arch.

But yeah…

[LordJynx]

To see Roblox on Linux would be amazing. Linux is the best os in my opinion and I’ve wanted it for years and years. I think taking Linux onboard will open up so many more opportunities for Developers but many bugs and issues, but for every problem there is a way to fix it. The Linux community is one of the best communitys out there to get help. It’d be a massive leap for Roblox but it can be very beneficial for Roblox and developers. Roblox should run a test site and try it. I think it’ll open up so many more opportunities.

[rbx_lua (Matthew)]

@LordJynx

but for every problem there is a way to fix it

…and an entire dedicated studio/client development team working specifically on linux costing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year…

[LordJynx]

I know. Can only dream.

[shayner32 (shayne)]

What’s more secure - an open source OS where anyone can read every single line of code in the OS and hence easily find vulnerabilities in it, or a closed source popular OS where it takes years to find vulnerabilities which 99% of the time only affect people who don’t stay up to date?

[codes4breakfast (Lucas)]

Microsoft releases security patches every month fixing bugs that were found in this period, and even then there’s a black market in that aspect (a black hat wouldn’t want to disclose the bug so it can be fixed because he can earn more money by abusing that exploit), while in open source systems the community is responsible for finding bugs and fixing them, which is usually faster (plus the risk of a bug slipping by is smaller since there are more people seeing the code).

I don’t really want to derail this thread anymore, so if you want anything else, you can PM me it.

[Lilly_S]

Please keep the thread on-topic - this isn’t a discussion about open source vs. closed source operating systems, pros and cons of each, etc. - it’s about potentially porting Roblox to Linux systems, which has been stated would take a lot of engineering manpower and resources that doesn’t seem worth it right now.

[ZarsBranchkin]

Not going to voice in on the politics side of this issue, but I can share some of my experience using roblox on linux.

For around half a year I’ve been fully maining arch linux and even managed to get some work done on roblox fairly smoothly. Studio works very nicely toghether with wine, with the only exception being test server, although I managed to find a fix for that.

Getting the player to work, on the other hand, is pretty hopeless. Tried looking everywhere, but didn’t find any reasonable errors on what goes wrong. It seems that the player trips on some security check and since that’s sort of the intentional feature, there are no relevant messages spewed out by wine.

On the topic of an official port, I think the developers would benefit from this the most. I personally find working in unix environment as much smoother experience, especially if you make use of external tools to work on roblox projects. Though I do see how developers are minority of roblox player base and even smaller part of them are interested in using linux and their own tailored development tools.

[Brinker7]

Around two weeks ago, Google dropped that Chrome OS now supports running native Linux applications. The feature is already available in development channels and some people have gotten Steam and other software to run. I don’t know what Google’s furthers plans are with this feature, but is this going to change Roblox’ stance on supporting Linux in the (near) future?

[Tiffblocks]

Roblox can already be run on supported chromebooks due to the Android app compatibility layer and some work on our end to make stuff like window resizing and mouse/keyboard input work.

[zeuxcg]

This is very interesting. It might be a game changer depending on whether this will work well and what kind of hardware coverage they will have. Do you know what the performance is like for 3D graphics?

[Brinker7]

Right now the 3d graphics performance is quite terrible, but according to some reddit users there is evidence in the Chromium OS repositories that this issue is being worked on (I’ve tried to verify this claim, but the Chromium OS repositories are a big old mess). Google is achieving the app support by running Linux application in containers, which are managed by their custom container software. Within the container it is still plain old Debian Linux. I don’t know what hardware Google will let this feature run on in the future, but right now the feature is available on all PixelBook models.

Here’s a link to the article which set off the news bomb. It was officially announced at Google IO, but I can’t find the original video announcement.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/08/chrome-os-is-getting-linux-app-support/

All that said, earlier this year I finished a Roblox related project with someone at my university, and in the process we brought Roblox to the attention of some educators. They were very excited to incorporate Roblox into their technology related educated programs instead of something like Scracth, since Roblox translates to actual real world experience. Taking in account that schools are trending towards replacing their current devices with Chromebooks, having Roblox Studio available on Chromebooks might be an important step in getting or keeping Roblox in the classroom.

Not on the Chromebook side of things, but what I didn’t think of before is that Roblox is losing out on a group of developers by not supporting at least Roblox Studio on Linux. I’ve seen quite a bit of developers leave the platform because they no longer want to deal with Windows and/or maintaining a working copy of Roblox Studio under WINE. It’s hard putting a price on this group of developers, since there are probably no hard stats and there is the fact that a developer on Roblox can can bring in an extreme amount of revenue (or not). I’m not giving this is as a real argument, but its still something to think about.

Also responding to @Tiffblocks, this is still a thread about Roblox Studio, not just the game client.

[zeuxcg]

@Brinker7

having Roblox Studio available on Chromebooks might be an important step in getting or keeping Roblox in the classroom

Yeah we’re aware of this issue. It’s unfortunate that Google’s OS is locked to the degree it is… there aren’t many options to make Studio available on Chrome OS.

[Kampfkarren (boyned)]

Isn’t Roblox Studio reported to work on Wine? Perhaps when Chrome/Linux support for 3D graphics is better you can fiddle with that.

[Brinker7]

Studio used to work kind of decently under WINE if you could put up with the constant crashing. But more recently the ability to open and update Roblox places has completely broken. The new plugin widgets should come with an epilepsy warning because it does nothing but flash. On top of all that, you have to force it to run in Windows XP mode because the shaders used to render the Studio home page just won’t work under WINE (Forcing it to run in Windows XP mode gives you the old pages).

It takes a lot of dedication to have to put up with all of that for a long time.

[TheBristlefrost (Bristlefrost)]

Sorry for this, my intention is not to bump this topic but I need to say my words about this.

This topic has been inactive since 2018 and Linux support is stronger now than back in 2018. Because of that I feel like Roblox should reconsider Linux support few times more.

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So how is Linux support stronger than in May of 2018?

@Maximum_ADHD

I think he said something along the lines of the market share not being significant enough for them to invest effort into supporting the platform.

Linux market share is bigger and it’s growing. (so you would have to support Linux sooner or later anyways if the market share matters)
We can look at StatCounter data to see that Linux market share is actually growing. It is not growing that fast but still growing.
Here we can see that Linux was at around 1.6% in May of 2018
Now Linux is at ~1.9% market share
.3% growth. And we can see that Linux has grown a lot recently (1.55% in May 2019, 1.6% in June, 1.65% in July, 1.72% in August, 1.73% in September, 1.77% in October, 1.82% in November, 0.85% in December, 1.9% in January)

That’s enough for the market share, we can assume Linux is at ~2% right now. Now let’s move onto how many games are there for Linux.

If we click the Linux checkbox on Steam all products page, I get 14481 results. If we look at Wayback Machine snapshot of that page from May 2018, there are 10455 results. So around 4000 new games for Linux. And that includes many really popular titles, I don’t see a point why Roblox wouldn’t consider Linux anymore and other big games have already made Linux versions. And that 14481 only grows when we include games that can be played through Wine and Proton. If Roblox doesn’t support Linux, why implement an anticheat that prevents playing on Wine then. Back to those numbers, the number has grown and is growing which means there are players on Linux and interest to make games running on Linux. Otherwise the numbers wouldn’t have grown.

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Why it’s important to support Linux, even despite all the work it includes?

As Linux user myself (I use Ubuntu and Manjaro btw ) it is hard to be a Roblox developer. Getting Roblox Studio to work is enough work already and Roblox Client doesn’t even work, no matter what. And my solution to get the client working is to dual-boot Windows 10. Many devs are having the same problem. Linux market share and player count are increasing so the decision to support Linux would have to be done in the future anyways. Many popular games already have Linux support and that wasn’t bad decision for them. They have players in the Linux version too. Why would it be bad decision for Roblox then? Even if Roblox admins refuse to port Roblox to Linux, why there is that anticheat check that prevents Wine? Just remove that check or make it like if isOnWine == true then dontCheck() end not too much work.

If I would be Roblox engineer I would port Roblox over to Linux no matter what, I wouldn’t give up. Sadly I’m not Roblox engineer (and probably never will be) so that day will never happen.

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If Linux won’t be supported I will start a project aiming to get Roblox player working on Linux.

Roblox admins please come here and reconsider this.

[Autterfly]

Not to be that guy, but a 0.3% market share increase sounds pretty insignificant. You also misunderstand, Roblox doesn’t prevent people from playing on Wine. As far as I know, Wine doesn’t work because there are Windows specific checks which fail under it.

Making it so checks are removed under Wine like you propose is also a huge security hole. Anyone can spin up a client even on Windows and tell it “hey we’re on Wine trust me.”

I think it was Tiffblocks that also mentioned it in a Discord server that it’d be a headache to support Linux for a ton of reasons. One example she gave was input: you have tons of ways of getting input and sometimes it varies distro by distro.

I want Linux support too, so count me on board the hope train, but it’s probably not gonna happen.

[TheBristlefrost (Bristlefrost)]

@Autterfly

I would prefer one way of getting input over other. Also, not all distros must be supported. Some big ones like Ubuntu, Manjaro, Fedora, Mint etc must be supported tho. That would cover most of linux users already.

And for Linux .3% is significant because Linux has low market share anyways.

YAY! Opened again!

[Reinitialized]

I will say, the only reason I’m still on Windows is cause of how difficult it is to be able to run ROBLOX without dealing with Nvidia drivers and Virtual Machines. I’ve researched into the WINE support issue, and I’ve gotten conflicting answers stating both ROBLOX intentionally and unintentionally broke it. Regardless, even if there isn’t enough drive to support Linux natively, if they supported WINE it would suffice for the time being until the usage margin grew enough to a point of native support.

TLDR: at least support WINE so I don’t have to use Windows, would appreciate dearly.

EDIT:
I know this may go against the nature of Linux, but we’re already asking for native support of propiertary software on our open source OS of choice. If the issue comes down to management of the App between various Distros, there are various solutions to that.

EDIT2.5
Sad topic closure Confused but happy unlocked thread noises

[Masquence]

I currently want to switch my host computer to Linux but I can’t because I want to play Roblox, and use Roblox studio without performance and accessibility issues.

Roblox does not currently work on linux, Linux users currently make up nearly 3% or more of the market share, it would help both, users and Roblox to bring compatibility to Linux.

Users use linux to be on a more safe, and secure os without all the bloatware that Windows has to offer. If we had an official version of Roblox on linux it would be more easier and accessible for us to run Roblox officially instead of side loading and using a virtual machine.

Adding to what I noted before, people with lesser performance computers running linux cannot even think about running Roblox because of the massive performance problems and the amount of RAM Windows uses.

Bringing official compatibility with Linux, users will be able to play Roblox without the hassle of loading up a vm and playing with less performance.

I understand that you can run Roblox Studio with grapejuice, but even that has some problems here and there. With official support people can run Studio without worrying about any compatibility problems. Let’s say no, for some reason Roblox does not want to give linux official support because of reasons like using more resources for less value, the least Roblox can do is introduce wine support.