Why Is this in Community resources?
There is no real specific section for a post like this, in theory, this can be a feature request, an engine request (both of which I can’t make a topic inside of), a community tutorial and a community resource at the same time, and it’s pretty hard to choose between these 4 if if you want to combine all 4 into 1 post, it’s pretty inconvenient to post 4 posts about the same thing, so let’s put this all in one
What are we going to go over?
We are going to go over a few things, which I will list here:
1. Why official Linux support will likely never happen
2, Why Roblox might be wrong about what they look at Linux
3. How you can play roblox under linux unofficially (step by step)
This post isn’t me forcing roblox to make official support, this isn’t a petition.
Why official Linux support will likely never happen
Well there are a few reasons why Roblox may not want to make official support for linux, while yes, they are a multi billion $ company with tons of resources, it really isn’t a good idea in the short term.
So starting over with the obvious, cost, while yes, it’s not really cost effective in the short term, in the long term however, it is a thing to consider. As Linux is a growing market that barely any company touches, this is a dream for a company like Roblox, as there’s no competition, what are you gonna compete against? air? yeah right. But Roblox doesn’t see any market in Linux yet.
Let’s look at Roblox’s point of view, Linux was never made for the general PC market, the marketshare is low, and that Linux users are unlikely to pay for stuff like Robux, or Premium, because of how we advocate about how we got our OS for free, and Roblox isn’t going to spend time to train their huge arsenal of employees to be able to use Linux, just for 3% of the PC marketshare. And the amount of linux distros you have to support is simply out of the question
Roblox even confirmed on On July 28, 2012 that Linux support is 97% complete but on RDC 2020’s QnA section, they have said there are no plans for linux support, they likely saw what it is.
2, Why Roblox might be wrong about what they look at Linux
As briefly mentioned in the statements above, There is no competition for a growing market, while yes, you can look at the 3% of people that do use linux and say “well noone uses that”, but let’s do some quick maths,
There are 8 billion people on earth, let’s divide that by 50%, and we have 4 billion people that own a computer and use a computer, and let’s multiply that by 3%, we get 120,000,000 Linux users worldwide that currently use Linux as their main PC OS, that’s a huge market. You can do this math yourself, you will come to the same conclusion.
So if Linux has 120,000,000 users, then why is no company going to for Linux? Well, they aren’t going to waste time making support for Linux if there’s only 3% of people that use the OS, they see 3% as a small insignificant market, but they are wrong, and some companies like Google and Steam realized that. Currently Steam is working on improving gaming on Linux, and as of right now, Gaming on linux has been the best it’s ever been, and Google uses Linux for a bunch of different things meant for consumers (even though I don’t support google’s use of Linux, they still use Linux), Android is based on Linux, along with ChromeOS. So there is a huge market with little competition
And there’s an added bonus if you support Linux, as you aren’t just going after the PC market, you are going for potentially the entire world, how? well, 99% of global servers use linux because it’s stable, most banks ATMs use linux for security, the ISS uses linux to stay up in the air, your router probably uses some sort of linux flavour, and your smart toaster that connects to wifi for some reason, probably uses linux. You simply can’t not use linux, don’t believe me? go google it. do your own research.
Let’s go with the “there are too many distros to support” argument, which is pretty stupid in my opinion, because if you look at it bare bones, every single distro is the same thing, all you really need to create a linux distro is an package manager (apt, pacman ext.), a desktop environment, a few utilities and drivers and you are good to go, that’s all you need, Roblox could probably just put support for arch linux and debian, and you automatically support 99% of every modern distro.
Roblox technically already has Linux support, as they support Android, which is based on Linux, and it works pretty well under ChromeOS, do a little bit of tweaking around to make it work with Linux, and you now have Linux support with barely any effort.
Let’s transition from fact to more fact with my opinion sprinkled on top:
Looking at the “we won’t pay for a robux or premium if we don’t wanna pay for our OS” argument, which is also pretty stupid, most of us in the linux community have matured up, and we are more than willing to pay for stuff to support a project, most of us are security and privacy conscious and don’t want to deal with Microsoft’s bloated inconsistent ever-closing spyware and don’t want to pay a liver for a Mac. Linux gives us the freedom, security and privacy to let us do what we want to do with our computers & hardware.
Alongside the fact that we have essentially built the best OS to code on and innovate, there’s a reason why coders like using Linux, and this is also a huge advantage, as you can expect actual good experiences on roblox, because most of us aren’t children and know what we are doing, and let alone we have an actual brain to know what is fun and what isn’t. what’s a cash grab and what isn’t, what is okay and what isn’t, we are mature, not stupid. (You may deny with me, this is my opinion again)
Transitioning back to facts as this is the end of the section
How you can play roblox under linux unofficially (step by step)
Well even if roblox is not likely to make it official, we can still get a reasonably good roblox experience under Linux. I will go over 2 main distros (Arch & Debian), as you are going to be likely using at least one of these
You need to have these specs to run:
- x86_64 CPU
- GPU that supports OpenGL 4.0 or Vulkan (both are available under a modern GPU)
- x86_64 GNU/Linux system with glibc or amd64 FreeBSD 13.0+ system
Not required to have, but a nice to have if you use these day to day
- Pipewire with pipewire-pulse to be able to use voice chat
- Wayland with XWayland for better performance
Let’s start off with debian based distros
First, you need the i386 architecture, you can do this by executing
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
on your terminal of choice
Second, you will need to install the grapejuice keyring you can do this by executing
curl https://gitlab.com/brinkervii/grapejuice/-/raw/master/ci_scripts/signing_keys/public_key.gpg | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/grapejuice-archive-keyring.gpg
on your terminal
Third, to access the packagefor grapejuice, you need to add it to your repo, do that by using
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grapejuice.list <<< 'deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/grapejuice-archive-keyring.gpg] https://brinkervii.gitlab.io/grapejuice/repositories/debian/ universal main'
on your terminal
Now since a new repo has been added, you have to update your your system that way it is found
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
Before we go install grapejuice, if you haven’t already, please install wine
sudo apt install wine
You should get the latest version if you don’t have it installed already,
Now that you have wine, go and install the package for grapejuice
sudo apt install grapejuice
And now you can open up grapejuice, and hit install roblox, and you are good to go.
Now let’s go over arch based distros
We are gonna install it using makepkg, which is a straight forward process:
git clone --depth=1 https://aur.archlinux.org/grapejuice-git.git /tmp/grapejuice-git
cd /tmp/grapejuice-git
makepkg -si
You should be good to go and open grapejuice and install roblox using GUI.
I have issues with the roblox client
Incase you have issues with wine // other stuff, you can install a prebuild patched version of wine that fixes a lot of the issues (however I recommend you don’t do this unless necessary)
Run the commands below to automatically download a pre-compiled Wine:
cd /tmp
wget https://pastebin.com/raw/5SeVb005 -O install.py
python3 install.py
If you have other issues, and I didn’t feature your issue, please check grapejuice documentation for more info:
https://brinkervii.gitlab.io/grapejuice/docs/
I hope y’all found this post a bit informational, and have gotten a little bit more educated about the topic. This post has taken up 2 hours to write down alone. lol (not counting research or other stuff) If I missed something, please let me know, I am a human, I am not perfect, so feel free to ask around, and give feedback.
