Thank you for the confirmation and the reply! I know there are a lot of questions and concerns piling up, and I appreciate any time you might spend answering the many questions coming from the users playing on Linux.
I would appreciate clarification on whether or not Roblox/byfron intend to simply prevent users from using Wine, or if they intend to punish the use of Wine in order to maintain control.
I am concerned about this, because I have been developing and playing Roblox on Linux for three years, so, as a result of this change, I will need to invest into hardware for virtualization. I understand that this is not something that most people can easily do, especially because it isn’t very accessible, so many users will be forced to dual boot. This is cheaper but still really inconvenient, requires an extra drive, and can put a hit on the engine’s performance for them, on top of being very disruptive for people’s workflows. If you have ever tried more than one OS, that is the pain of dual booting but every day. Except, it’s even more time consuming and frustrating hahaha… All the screenshotting software is different, different hotkeys, graphical environments, troubleshooting, drivers, interface, etc, etc, it may take multiple minutes to reboot switch in order to obtain files or information you forgot, and you are then forced to lose your IDE states, and your studio states, etc because you have to shut everything down. On lower end PCs, which are going to be the ones dual booting, startup may add a lot of overhead and therefore a lot of performance impacts that last until a lot of the software on user’s PCs has finished loading or starting, including Windows OS related things.
A lot of these drawbacks can be mitigated from virtualization by having that more familiar host on top for purposes other than just Roblox, but that requires having an extra GPU, extra storage space, and more powerful hardware for being able to support the overhead of a virtual machine.
If Linux users can still play at the risk of being banned, this may be worth it for some people, if Byfron is stable enough to not result in “false” detections due to incompatibilities or inconsistencies in Wine’s environment.
A statement about Linux+Cheating
This is a bit of an opinionated rant but I have a lot of things that I think need to be said, and, I would appreciate if these arguments could also be considered by Roblox, but I also understand why they may not. I and many others will appreciate smaller acknowledgement or clarification, e.g. of the above, or anything else, even if it doesn’t align with our interests. (Sorry for hanging on this little intro bit as much as I am but I just want to make it really clear what my intents with my message actually are)
I believe that Roblox already understands a lot of these concerns, and I do not expect support from Roblox at all, especially not any time soon, so, I intend for all of these things to just provide an open justification for why Roblox on Linux is safe against cheating, even if it is not entirely relevant at the moment.
I have no decisions from Roblox to argue against here, except that Wine will be blocked in some capacity, which, I believe is already relatively understandable, and, hope but do not expect to eventually see reversed in the future.
Cheating fundamentally isn’t compatible with Linux or Wine in more ways than just software
No modern Roblox exploit to my knowledge runs under Wine due to it lacking almost all support for any of the features used by Roblox exploits. Getting an exploit to run under Wine would be inherently more difficult than Windows for the same reason that getting Roblox to run under Wine is, but even more so due to the inherently more unsafe features that they rely on. Roblox has the benefit of not depending on said features, being memory safe and self-contained, etc (and therefore predictable). Exploits don’t completely have that benefit, and Wine is unlikely to properly support the behaviours that exploits perform since they are not part of Wine’s main intents (the kinds of things exploits do aren’t common in software!), and I think that fact is often missed.
That costs them a lot of time to potentially try and support, just like Roblox would have to invest into proper support for Linux, except the general population is against cheating under Wine or on Linux, because everyone just wants to be able to play and use Roblox. To create content on Roblox, and to enjoy content on Roblox.
Wine is not cheating software, the goal of Wine is to provide a compatibility layer for Windows software and games, and, I think that many of these bigger anti-cheat groups only prevent wine out of caution, and perhaps to protect users from detections that arise from incompatibilities. As Wine grows, these incompatibilities lessen, but, the ways in which Wine grows tend not to positively impact cheating software as much as it does the general population of other programs (it may even negatively impact cheating software).
Another important note, is that cheating software would be incentivized to employ its own Wine detections, because unlike on a Windows environment, it is difficult for them to maintain strict access to their paid tools. Exploits actually have even more incentive to make themselves incompatible with Wine than anti-cheat software does, because Wine makes it easier for people to essentially pirate these exploit softwares that try to implement whitelisting.
The distinction between other software here is that other software doesn’t tend to employ the same kinds of restrictions that cheat software does, they aren’t trying to maintain a monopoly or maintain control alongside a sibling/host software. The whole thing that makes cheat software valuable in the first place is the fact that other cheaper alternatives don’t exist, they are purely informational/algorithmic, can’t really be patented as a result afaik, are therefore are often secretive as they do not want their methods to be public and get fixed or re-used by competitors. They depend strictly on their ability to maintain control over cheating in Roblox to be profitable, and thus, unlike with something like Byfron, cheating software has really strong incentive to make it hard for people to use it under Wine (and they don’t need to care about being invasive in this regard) where their control and ability to detect your specific device will be more limited.
I believe it is also important to note, that wrapper software like Grapejuice which make it possible for the general population of non-technical Linux users don’t condone cheating either, and, it is obviously also in their best interest to prevent cheating in order to maintain a good reputation with Roblox and keep some ability to use Roblox on Linux available for those who want (or depend on) it.
Conclusion
For all these reasons, I would make a very strong prediction that cheating softwares, especially for Roblox, will always strongly prefer to stay on Windows and not move to Wine or Linux, even if Roblox were to hypothetically provide Linux binaries for Roblox. It’s cheaper, and easier, their whole target audience is on Windows, and Windows helps them maintain control over their monopoly in competitive and invasive ways that they could not under Wine that Roblox, even with Byfron.
Summary
- Exploits will have a hard time supporting Wine, meanwhile Roblox doesn’t need to because Linux+Roblox users will do this for them
- The large majority of Linux+Roblox users would not appreciate cheating on Wine or Linux
- Exploits rely on very strict monopoly-like control over their cheating space to be profitable, and they rely on the host software, Roblox to be easily “cheatable” in the first place. Since almost all of their paying users would be on Windows, it doesn’t make sense for them to try to open up the door for cheating on Linux when the time & monetary investment may already be significant enough to defeat Byfron to begin with to eat up a lot of their capacity for that, assuming that it is effective anti-cheat software. Lots of Linux users would shun exploiters anyways, as, well, this does exactly what nobody wants, and gives incentive for Roblox/Byfron to shut out Wine/Linux users.
