Proper support for the Linux platform

The problem is that releasing a client also sets an expectation that the client will be supported, no matter what Roblox actually intends here.

From a personal standpoint, I absolutely do hear all of the Linux users on here. I’m a pretty hardcore developer, I love open source stuff, Linux is fantastic. I would love to be able to ditch the likes of Windows and macOS and go full Linux one day. It would be awesome to own my own stack like that.

The problem here is that of limited resources. Roblox is a large company, but they are not infinite in size, and they are not capable of satisfying every single user need. It is actively in Roblox’s interest to capture as many players as possible who are interested and meet them in the most possible places on the most possible platforms. However, it is also actively in Roblox’s interest to not spend many times more money per user than they receive from them. Platforms generally enjoy ‘economies of scale’ here - there is a fixed cost to building out and maintaining a certain branch of the engine on a certain platform, but as the audience using that platform increases, the revenue is not fixed - it is instead marginal per-user in that audience. This is why Roblox can justify being on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Amazon tablets, et cetera. They have evaluated the opportunity cost of these platforms and decided that there are enough users (projected and current) that the fixed cost of continued maintenance can be amortised among them without massively tanking net profits. Remember that continued maintenance is far more than just technical - customer support may need training, for example.

You might think I’m talking about money a whole lot. Maybe that makes you think it’s some greedy capitalist pursuit. (I’d say that’s basically the foundation of capitalism as a pretty hard left socialist)But this is not about some guy’s pockets getting lined - not entirely. There are employees that need to get paid. Rent, electricity and gas bills will be due. Contractors will be hired. Research will be done. This costs money. Roblox needs to decide how much money they are dedicating to which causes, which also mean Roblox needs to decide how much money they should strive to make per user - aka, they need to figure out how they will amortise their fixed costs. If they can’t justify keeping it, it will go, because otherwise they will hurt real people and destroy real livelihoods by being financially irresponsible. If you don’t believe me, ask Meta how their Horizon speculative investment is going.

You may love something. I love it too. But we can’t play pretend and lose our tempers over Roblox doing something that is obviously business sense to them. It’s not even special, either - there is so much software I use every day that makes these very same calls, whether it’s my DAW, or my editing software, or my paint tool… Heck, even in the audio space, there’s plenty of companies making these calls about Windows versus macOS. Roblox is nothing special or new under the sun.

I am an advocate for Linux support everywhere, but I am kind of - nay - very tired of having to listen to the same old internet debates play out where one side is people who live in a world of business decisions and opportunity costs, and the other is in a fantasy post-scarcity utopia that doesn’t exist. Harsh words? Maybe. But that’s what I think, and bluntness is more concise than otherwise.

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Discussing this further…

Ultimately it needs the right people to provide reasonable and constructive feedback. Accepting when today is not the answer and others to not intervene when meaningless comments are provided.

I’ve made my stance clear and even so this is an important reply to read. Unfortunately the message has been tainted but the right thing from Roblox has been done and that is something to congratulate. The door has been closed. When things make more sense, when the optics show better, and the answer is more clear than ever, I expect further discussion over the facts and what is the discussed best practice.

Also a good clean up is always the best outcome of these things.

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In the end, a civil and calm discourse is required for both sides to understand each other.

Roblox has clarified its stance and that means a lot, even if they aren’t able to justify support.

I’m sure that the majority of Linux users here fully understand Roblox’s reasoning and are happy for being allowed to take part in a civil and productive discourse with Roblox’s engineers.

As long as this mutually respectful communication continues, both sides will benefit from it.

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Is Linux support something that will forever be a no, or would it be reconsidered if the market continues to grow?

I think Roblox would absolutely support Linux if the users existed. There is rumored PS5 support coming as well. This is because there are plenty of people who own a PS5 as their most powerful gaming device.

The problem is supporting a platform has a constant cost (generally speaking)
So if, for example, it takes 50 engineers to support a platform, you have to justify spending this money to operate & upkeep that platform:

50 engineers on windows - millions of players on windows
50 engineers on iOS - millions of players on iOS
50 engineers on Android - millions of players on android
50 engineers on Linux - couple hundred / thousand players at most

So this equation has to balance out. Not to mention, anybody who uses Linux is typically a desktop power user and will also have a Windows / Mac OS to run Roblox. So - they aren’t necessarily “losing” people who run Linux. But if Roblox wasn’t on iPhones, they would actually be losing people who have no other gaming device.

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I think this comparison doesn’t do justice to how much of a pain proper support for Linux can be. The customer support end would have to be prepared for not only an odd combination of hardware, but also potentially an odd combination of hardware, distros, desktop environments, and the software that holds it together (Nouveau vs NVIDIA proprietary, X11 vs Wayland, etc). Customer support needs to be ready to deal with even more combinations of hardware and software than Windows for a much smaller but much more vocal audience. Roblox not supporting this makes sense… mostly. Special support for AMD + Arch for the Steam Deck and future handhelds would be much appreciated.


As I have mentioned many times in several threads, what I don’t appreciate is that Roblox has put in the engineering effort (planning, implementation, validation, and maintenance) to actively block us from trying on native Linux or on VMs. For now, VMs is easy to satisfy with a feature provided by Microsoft. This has raised the bar to having a desktop with dual GPUs and being able to set up VFIO. Laptop users + handheld users + those who won’t buy a second graphics card just for Roblox now can’t even try to play Roblox on Linux. Again, not because we can’t make it work, but because Roblox won’t even let us try to make it work.

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All we ask is not proper support, but the simple acknowledgement and support of community derived tools. As mentioned by many, all we require is the minimum possibility to execute Roblox programs through Wine on Linux.

I’m not sure why, but I feel like a majority of game corporations tend to have a mindset towards Linux/KVM as “an accessory to cheating”, which is highly unlikely as the average cheater would probably not go as far as to switch to another OS & kernel altogether merely to cheat.

Take a look at what Easy Anti Cheat did - where they used to actively blocked Linux and VM users from accessing games (keep in mind how less than 1% Linux users would probably be using Linux to cheat).


Linux users are highly adaptive; we’re developers - we do not require a fully complete & functional client. All we require is acknowledgement for our existence and the minimal execute permissions to run Roblox. I’m sure the community will eventually find ways to patch and make the Roblox experience stable, with no input whatsoever.

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We’ve already figured out how to bypass the Wine check, but yes, Roblox absolutely should give a clear timeline for its removal.

As for the fragmentation of the Linux desktop, it will decrease as time goes on. Especially as the shift to Wayland gets closer to completion.

RHEL considers X11 to be deprecated and will drop it entirely in a future release.

Maybe in a few years Roblox will reconsider? Anyways, right now, the only thing we require to continue using Roblox is a blank check to make the necessary fixes and patches. Blocking wine (even if it’s a relatively easy block to bypass) complicates the situation greatly.

Native support is still the ideal solution long-term, but that might take anywhere from 5 to infinite years. However, Roblox’s unofficial endorsement of community tools and solutions would be a great help in the meantime.

Maybe there’s some sort of low-cost way in which Roblox could help us, such as organizing a community group to allow better coordination with developers of community tools for running Roblox. For example, Roblox could invite core developers and members of the Roblox Linux community to a feedback program, allowing for better coordination between us and Roblox but letting them spend minimal engineering costs and time.
The Linux community would still deal with all of the compatibility heavy-lifting, but also with whatever documentation and support Roblox is able to provide, and possibly even make Roblox aware of possible small fixes and workarounds they’re capable of implementing on their end.

Linux has always been a collaborative endeavor, so it’d be fitting. It’s a good compromise where Roblox would only need to dedicate a small amount of time for communicating with us, while we can deal with developing the solutions for enabling Roblox on Linux.

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It’s doesn’t even have to be a resource problem as much as a value proposition problem. Even if we had infinite resources to work on projects, devs might not get the Linux experience they want. There has been some feedback from developers on the blockage of Wine / VMs in the immediate term, for instance. While those developers are understandably upset as their dominant platform was busted, there would even more developers (and players) upset if we didn’t – or were slower – in curbing exploits.

Users will want what is best for them personally, and that’s okay, but that means that sometimes we won’t be able to satisfy everyone.

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What do you exactly mean by “odd hardware”?

Distro compatibility is mostly solved by using flatpak.

Most mainstream desktop environments are compatible with each other, e.g. if an app runs under Cinnamon then it runs under Gnome and Xfce.

I don’t think it matters to the game engine which display driver you use (nouveau or propertiary), other than performance, unless you mean choosing the appropriate drivers by the user. It’s a support case that you can easily prepare for on Ubuntu-based distros. Users of other distros are usually technical enough to figure it out themselves.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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That’s the case with Windows as well.

I agree, that’s a flaw of the Linux desktop ecosystem as a whole.


Indeed. For me the main appeal of using Linux is not using Windows. If I have to dual boot then I might as well stay on Windows.

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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?

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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.

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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 :+1:

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It probably is not high on their priority list, but it’s probably something for them to work on when they’re done with their planned updates.

I’d expect it to come out this year or next year

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That’s the case with Windows as well.

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.

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