Thank you for the transparency! This cleared up a lot of details for me.
From what I’m gathering, you are blocking Virtual Machines and compatibility tools like Proton and Wine for analysing telemetry data on how well the new client is performing, would this mean the block is temporary until there is enough data to go off of? Roblox’s user-base is huge, so I’m sure it wouldn’t take that long.
And if not, would be viable to exclude and block telemetry from clients that are being ran under a compatibility layer or virtualisation software?
I’m also super happy that Studio will not block Wine
I can confirm that currently there is no code in Studio that actively prevents Wine. Also, to my knowledge there are no plans to have any Wine blocking code added to Studio.
And this is great for Steam Deck users, while yes Windows can run on it, not worth the loss of space on the low storage models, easier to just run Steam’s OS, but it is a linux distro which has no support, and we have to use Wine.
I have some doubts about this which is hopefully a lack of knowledge of how Roblox collects data at the sheer scale they do. As I am sure you are aware, Roblox has already been detecting WINE usage shortly after it was fixed, and long before Byfron was property of Roblox. If Roblox has to intentionally block a small dedicated portion of the community from accessing their platform because it skews analytics, this concerns me greatly in terms of my confidence in Roblox being able to identify and fix issues. I hope you are able to clear the air a bit better as to why this is necessary especially if official/unofficial support is considered a priority and on the roadmap?
The issue is not so much detecting Wine and reporting it via telemetry, but rather the fact that Hyperion crashes compromised processes intentionally. Currently, our 64-bit client is not Wine-compatible, which means that there would be crashes unrelated to Hyperion. Since we are in the early stages of the rollout, we analyze every single crash dump that is uploaded for potential bugs rather than malicious interference. As you can imagine, we’re talking about thousands of crash dumps. Adding more to it would be counterproductive.
Just disable reports related to Wine crashes, this is an issue that shouldn’t exist.
Blocking entirely a community just to prevent that seems like a lazy solution compared to just not reporting if it’s caused by instances on Wine.
Then just disable telemetry from being sent from wine clients (which the post proves is something the client is capable of doing), this is an issue that can be fixed without alienating a chunk of the community.
I do all of my Roblox game development on Linux and do not dual-boot, so I hope that the Wine and VM block can be lifted as soon as enough data is collected for the crash dumps.
I do know you’re probably just the messenger in this case, and I do appreciate the time you’re taking the time to respond to our concerns so quickly.
I do hope you and the staff team understand how difficult it is for us to understand how it wouldn’t be possible to simply ignore/leave Roblox on WINE out of initial analytics and logs from telemetry. If Roblox and/or Byfron is capable of detecting it is running under WINE, then it should be capable of determining whether the telemetry data is worthy of being sent.
I would imagine the process for determining if Roblox crashed is at minimal a entirely separate process within the Roblox application. Considering Roblox already has tools in place for determining if it is running under Wine, it should then be possible to perform a if not (isWine) then submitLogs() end based on logs generated from the local application.
I entirely agree, rather than blocking Wine/Linux users from using Roblox, why not just disable telemetry or other features that Roblox doesn’t want on Linux for the time being, it makes not sense to block the entire user base.
Not a messenger but rather a developer who understands the passion of the community and attempts to give an explanation why it is not as simple as an if() statement.
The Roblox client and Hyperion are decoupled. The crash uploader, which is part of the client, cannot determine why Hyperion caused the process to crash.
And as long as GNU/Linux based consoles such as Steam Deck, and more and more Windows users are getting annoyed and upset about Microsoft shoving their ads, telemetries, and sometimes removing useful toggles of features and customizations, Linux’s market share will keep going up, Few years ago it was only below 1%, after Valve released their Steam Deck with more influencers reviewing it, and Microsoft releasing Windows 11 with it’s own popups and requirements, it grew up closer, till nearly 2% as for today.
This seems to make sense considering Wine itself is simply an API implementation (and re-creation) rather than a full-fledged environment.
There are bound to be issues related to Wine (and in this case, in tandem with the Hyperion solution) because the client cannot run under Wine the same exact way it does under real Windows; all the implementation can do is attempt to provide the resources necessary for the program to run, let alone run well.
Wine also cannot replicate Windows 1-to-1, as some of the resources it uses are pulled from the UNIX system it runs on rather than its own collection thereof. One difference in the code implementation can make all the difference, particularly when something refuses to work properly. I would, however, still retain confidence in regard to the engineers behind the client. Acknowledging the functionality of Wine is enormous in comparison to ignoring it all together.
As for the telemetry? It doesn’t make sense to remove it since:
A) You’re not getting the information necessary, even if it would clog the feedback, and
B) information is key to solving issues regarding any program in general.
A program can’t be ghosted like this, otherwise it would be left out to dry. Feedback and/or telemetry are critical to getting a program to become stable. You’re basically requesting that it be left to the WineHQ team, which can be done but is by no means the most reliable option unless the maintainer doesn’t care.
This is exactly what seems to be the case here with the client, in my own eyes.
I do appreciate this explanation, as you are right in the fact we don’t know the whole process. I hope you didn’t take my previous thank you as sarcasm, I really did mean it considering a lot of these posts go unanswered for sometimes years due to the limited amount of resources Roblox possesses despite being such a massive community.
I do hope it is considered improving the logic of the crash uploader where it is capable of determining whether Wine is being ran or not. I don’t know exactly where the check is, but I do know the Roblox client as it stands does have the ability to determine if it is running under Wine or not.
Thank you, Blodau. You have identified the issue very well. As you suspected, one of the reasons Hyperion is not running on Wine is because we delve deeply into the internals of Windows.
There’s good telemetry solely for problem diagnosing, and there’s also bad telemetry that distributes any part of your personal data without any obvious consent, like crash dumps for example which can include personal data in it. Even if a program could automatically strip out certain regions of the dump with potentially personal data in it, Uploading crash memory dumps requires explicit consent from the user because it’s actually a violation of GDPR if a program decided to automatically upload crash memory dumps without any obvious user consent.