Roblox studio was ported to 64-Bits As well, Roblox studio works fine on linux thanks to Bitdancer however he said that he only did limited testing, i don’t know if that’s still the case.
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Sadly, Roblox will probably never “officially” be on Linux.
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Right now they have no plans to make a native client, that doesn’t mean that Roblox will never make one, it just means that the marketshare of linux is too low for them to justify it. They will probably make plans if the marketshare of linux continues to grow.
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Every day i am in pain knowing i am forced to continue supporting microsoft because of this. When microsoft stops supporting windows 10, what then? Would Roblox ever consider it ? 
Companies don’t support Linux because not many people use it. Not many people use it because some companies don’t support it. it’s a paradox.
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I feel the same exact way. The only thing that is stopping me from have a privacy and developer centric environment is the lack of true support. We’re not getting a Linux client all because we aren’t getting a Linux client.
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Sorry for continuing this dead thread.
If I recall correctly, it is Roblox Studio that utilises Qt, rather than the actual Roblox player app itself. The Roblox player app is intricate in terms of graphics APIs, complicating the prospect of definitively porting Roblox to Linux. Windows relies on the DirectX Graphics API, whilst macOS utilises their own API, Metal.
You can specify the API you want to use for rendering in Studio by navigating to the “Graphics” tab in settings, where you will find options for DirectX, Metal, Vulkan, OpenGL, and various other graphics APIs. However, it is unclear whether this change affects both Studio and the Roblox player app itself globally. Based on my personal experience, altering studio settings will not impact the player app’s rendering settings. Each operating system clearly seems to favour an API optimised for itself, and the player app doesn’t provide a clear method to enforce the use of a specific API in the player app.
Vulkan stands out as an exception from the list, as it isn’t specifically favoured by any OS. In fact, it may even be the “saviour” in terms of a solution for interoperability between OSes. Vulkan is compatible with Windows, macOS, and even Linux, raising the question of why there isn’t a native Linux port if Vulkan is available for rendering anyways.
However, its also important to note that usually there isn’t a simple “compile” button to generate bulds for all platforms simultaneously, including Linux. Being a software developer myself for Numelon, it would be a bit of an understatement for me to say that compiling for every single platform is chaotic, let alone Linux… Compiling for Linux necessitates performing the compilation on a Linux system itself, using relevant libraries tailored to specific Linux distributions.
In an ideal scenario, and I wish, compiling for Linux would be a straightforward process, but the reality is more complex due to the diverse nature of Linux distributions, each with their own unique characteristics. Despite sharing the same kernel, the handling of various aspects differs drastically, making it challenging to standardise the compilation process across multiple operating systems and different Linux flavours.
You dont have to dig deep to find out that any application with support for Linux has a partially chaotic download page, also revealing the chaotic nature of Linux support. Each distribution has its own package manager, software installation, settings, window manager, settings, etc. For instance, OpenRGB offers five download links for different Linux distributions, and for different VERSIONS of each distribution (excluding all the separate links that are for different architectures and bits), highlighting the need for tailored installation methods. There’s deb, tar, bin, flathub, and so much more… Obviously I wouldn’t expect Roblox to be in a package manager or on FlatHub, but thats still something important to note.
For Roblox to support Linux effectively, it would require a comprehensive strategy to ensure consistent installation across all distributions, despite all of the differences I mentioned above, including graphics.
Furthermore, the challenge of just porting in general is kind of exacerbated by the fact that Roblox uses its own proprietary, in-house game engine. Building everything internally poses another layer of complexity, and whilst what Roblox does with its engine is absolutely impressive, this internal approach also strains human resources. Developing and maintaining a sophisticated game engine is no easy task, and demands the continuous efforts of numerous skilled engineers.
Roblox’s struggle with multi-platform support has been evident since the very start. It was initially available only on Windows around 2005/2006, which is as expected when a small piece of software or game starts off, but it took Roblox a a full six years to complete the port to OS X (older macOS) by 2011.
In 2021, Apple then introduced its M1 Chips based on the ARM architecture, however, it wasn’t until 2023 (two ENTIRE YEARS) that Roblox managed to natively port its game engine to ARM / Apple Silicon. This lengthy process highlights that the challenges extend beyond just operating systems. Despite Roblox being present on macOS for an entire decade and the minimal differences between architectures within the same OS, such as the tiny kernel additions to support ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, the porting process was obviously time consuming. Even though it is easy to assume that porting to a different architecture on the same OS would be straightforward - simply compiling on the target architecture - the reality is just far from that and more complex, particularly for Roblox which develops its own engine, adding an entire additional layer of difficulty to the task.
I know I’ve said a lot already, but more and more of these additional complex layers just pile up. Roblox’s implementation of Hyperion, their new anti cheat system, now demands extensive research and development efforts from not only Roblox, but ALSO the Hyperion team to ensure seamless integration of Roblox with the anti cheat across different platforms. This obviously further complicates the already challenging task of multi-platform support, as it adds another dimension of coordination and compatibility testing to the process. It wasn’t until recently that Roblox just gave up with Linux entirely because they (what I would think of as foolishly) favoured security instead of actual playability on a platform that couldn’t exploit anyways.
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Studio does work on linux, as it doesnt have anti cheat, but as for the client itself, its probably going to stay blocked on linux. still dont get why roblox cant just activate that blocker if it detects reverse engineering tools or a reverse engineering/hacking distro. and anybody can still reverse engineer on windows with tools like ghidra
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I entirely agree with this, while yes I agree with the fact that Linux is pretty complicated and it’s not easy to make it straight forward for everyone, overtime I do believe Roblox will change it’s mind
Linux’s marketshare is now growing fairly fast, according to Statcounter, about 1% of the global marketshare has been gained in the past 6 months alone, if we are optimistic and throw out some realism, a growth rate of 1% per 6 months would lead us to 10% in 3 years. This is a fairly static and unreasonable math I did in 5 minutes for this post, but you can see why it would make sense to start eyeing up Linux. Their main gripe was that there aren’t many users to make it worthwhile.
That also brings us onto other factors like the Steam Deck bringing Linux about a million different users that are just there for gaming, this also brings an example that if you support Linux, you would also support the Steam Deck, and potentially a lot of different devices, hell you’d support the ISS.
However again bringing us back to APIs, it is going to be very VERY difficult to port because of the amount of API functions and such. However I would also argue that you shouldn’t support Hannah Montana Linux, because just why? Just support Debian, Fedora and Arch and you’d pretty much already cover 99% of distros you’d actually use just like that, (that would actually also indirectly support Hannah Montana Linux because it’s based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian) and for the heck of it, you could half bake Arch and tell those people to compile the thing themselfs. They would do it, they already installed their system the MS DOS way anyway.
Either way though, it will take years, hell maybe even a decade, but we are giving the more and more reasons to do so due to the growing market, and especially growing gaming market. (It could be a potential investment? maybe?) I mean I switched over to Windows because of Roblox and Adobe, but the second Roblox starts supporting Linux I am heading right back in. And I am probably not the only one that thinks this way.
(Also Roblox technically already has some hold in Linux, Android is basically Linux disguised under a phone, and ChromeOS is from what I can tell, supported****, they already technically have a good starting point already.***)
This is mostly just my opinion, I am not saying this will be easy, this is far too difficult and I understand that, I made this a year ago and even I laugh at myself a year later I didn’t think of something as obvious as APIs.
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going through this, I have already tried to do so, unfortunately I run a muxless laptop, and lenovo has made it so complicated to get it to work. I have a second screen now, and the closest I have gotten was a graphical mess that would indicate a broken GPU under any circumstances, however my system does not have a broken GPU, infact I use it to this day to render complicated stuff and it works just fine.
and it’s not like I didn’t try my best either, I’ve been trying for months on end, and went through every single page on Google that was relevant, like I was at page 50 at one point and all the links were highlighted because I visited them all (talk about being desperate). I have tried basically everything under the sun and nothing. So I gave up. Mentally this wasn’t good for me. And on countless occassions, it just wasn’t worthwhile when I could just dual boot and not deal with lowered performance, mental pain or anything.
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I have left Roblox for a while now, mostly because of the community (ableism, transphobia) and the entire development environment, being a for-profit company. I am just now knowing what they did to Linux users just to implement an anti-cheat which will probably not achieve much of anything.
I can only say, this makes me want to be even more far away from Roblox. Their decisions are just selfish, they exploit the devs and users, and can’t even maintain the minimum for them if it doesn’t benefit them or make them money directly. This is yet another example of that.
This isn’t about the devs working on the proprietary bits, this is its view as a company, it makes no sense to attack them, even if they do end up sharing the same ideas as the people on top.
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ik this is very late, but why not make a port of it to flatpak?
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This was thrown around before and it is possible to package it all up together with WINE, but as of right now, WINE is blocked until further notice.
Recently Sober got released (By the same guys who made Vinegar).
Its an Android APK file that runs on Linux, It works so far so good.
Dont worry if its an APK, PC Only games work too.
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I think it would be amazing to be able to work on the go in studio on a Steam Deck, it’s definitely powerful enough. (please roblox)
the only way you can currently do that is by using vinegar, which works pretty fine for me. (only works for studio, use sober for the roblox player)
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Hello everyone, I am trying to install Roblox Player firstly before Roblox Studio but I’m getting an error from wine when it’s the end of installation:
This is an old post, check this one
also if you are curious on an updated post
check this post instead: