There are various methods to block telemetry. However, every bit of data is crucial for us, and we would greatly appreciate it if users refrained from taking such actions. As many of our users are minors, we are subject to thorough vetting, perhaps more than other companies. I can assure you that no personal data is transferred over the wire.
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When the market share becomes big enough sure, a linux version is warranted, but for now its not worth the time or effort when they could be focusing their efforts on much larger platforms such as PlayStation or Nintendo.
I’m a bit confused by this. Filtering out the telemetry of VM users has the same result for Roblox as VM users not playing, but it is the difference of Linux users with the extra hardware + VM experience being able to play Roblox vs giving us literally no option to test our games. Now Roblox is asking us to intentionally bypass this restriction with VM hardening.
Just to quickly expand on how much of a pain Linux is for QA: consider how many distributions (Debian, Arch, Alpine, etc) and desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Budgie, etc) there are. In theory, you can combine any of those together and get a whole host of issues. Some are interchangeable while others are very different and can have very different assumptions about what libraries exist and what don’t. With Windows and macOS, you mostly have a small list of versions (<5 for Windows, <10 for macOS) to QA test.
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I feel as though my question was misunderstood. I fully understand why anti-cheat needs to exist and I actively support it (provided it doesn’t overstep its bounds by trying to get kernel access to my computer). My question is just whether VMs and Wine should be considered permanently blocked or if this is a (potentially) temporary step to prevent them from polluting telemetry data ahead of a new product launch. I’m sorry if I gave the wrong impression here – I am 100% not interested in cheating in Roblox experiences. I am however interested in knowing what the future of Roblox on Linux looks like, and part of that involves VMs and Wine.
The way we have to approach this changes rather fundamentally if this blocking is temporary, because then it’s just inconvenient. If it isn’t though, we should probably know as soon as possible so people can adjust.
I’m not strictly speaking worried about my personal data being sent to Roblox. It’s definitely something I thought about, but I have a Google account so that ship has sailed.
My main motivation for wanting telemetry turned off is that I simply do not want Roblox gathering data about me and then sending it without my explicit consent. It doesn’t have to be personally identifying for it to be disquieting.
I know other people have said it, but I want to say it again: thank you for taking your personal time to respond to us here. It’s rare for any employee to speak plainly about stuff like this, and I really appreciate it.
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Do you have an estimate on the performance boost 64bit will have over 32bit?
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There is potential to unblock both technologies. For Wine, it depends on making Hyperion compatible. For virtual machines, it depends on how much they are being used to reverse engineer our technology.
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From that, it sounds like VMs are going to be locked out for good. With how big (and profitable) the exploit community is, they would already be on this the moment VMs aren’t blocked. Sounds like we are going to have an arms race forming like people with Rainbow Six Siege using VM hardening.
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There are quite a few data points. Most of them are in the 1-3% improvement range. However, there are a few outliers, such as Time per frame spent on physics code. In certain situations, the improvement is over 50%.
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Time flies when you are having fun 
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Are there any plans for linux releases? I’m just curious.
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Hi, I appreciate the fact that Byfron is being A/B tested right now. While it’s really usual for something like a major anticheat update to be rolled out as an A/B test, it gave me the opportunity to fix a problem with one of my projects accidentally tripping Byfron and making Roblox crash a minute after it launched, before a lot of people started encountering it. Also, people who sometimes use stuff that don’t work on the new 64-bit update (like me) are able to prolong the life of whatever we’re using by a few weeks while the 32-bit client still exists. Though, I guess fixing any bugs and ensuring a smooth rollout is what’s important right now.
With all that, are you able to provide a rough estimate on when it’s going to come out of A/B testing and start being deployed to everyone? My current guess is about few weeks.
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You are most likely underestimating the amount of Roblox Linux users. Yes, it’s true that the marketshare is way smaller compared to the likes of MacOS or Windows, but we are a much larger group than what you think.
Let’s take Grapejuice for example. According to Flathub, Grapejuice has been downloaded 163 thousand times.
Sure, it’s still a relatively small amount of users, but nonetheless far larger than your initial estimate.
Let’s not forget that Grapejuice isn’t the only tool which allows Linux users to play Roblox (just the most popular one) and that Flathub isn’t the only place where Grapejuice is available for installation; distribution packaging systems probably add several ten thousand more installs to the real number, and people that have built Grapejuice from source probably make up a few thousand more.
Lastly, some of these Linux users are also Roblox developers (like me or pretty much anyone that has sent a reply to this topic), and we bring in additional revenue and users from other platforms with the content we generate for Roblox. The amount of Linux users that are also developers within the Roblox platform is disproportionately higher compared to Windows or MacOS.
Someone like @Brinker7, who is responsible for Grapejuice’s upstream and has better access to analytics, could give us a better estimate on the amount of Roblox Linux users out there.
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Can attest that in my community alone Linux usage has grown rapidly over the past few years, likely due to my own advocation to its usage within said community, and can safely say that the usage of Linux based operating systems in my own game running roblox under wine is much larger than the average.
I think one of the key points to keep in mind going forward with any decisions to block linux user’s access to software you create is the rapidly growing linux marketshare. The Steam Decks release last year has proven that Linux is natively ready for gaming, and all of VALVes effort to streamline proton and enable its usage in games that require anticheat. (see EAC’s linux compatibility.)
Between January of 2022 and March of 2023, Linux’ market share rose from 2.19% to 2.85%, which is a substantial number and it can be aproximated that it’s market share is comparable to ChromeOS.
I just hope you keep in mind the growing market share of linux, as it is undoubtable that in the future it will only continue to grow, es specially with more and more dismay at the current state of Windows as an operating system.
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(sorry for the deleted reply, pressed shift+enter accidentally)
Sounds like a great theory, but it didn’t turn out to be true actually.
1+1+2+0+0+7+3+5+6=25 - still got the 32-bit client
4+4+7+0+0+0+2+4=21 - also got the 32-bit client, FPS unlocker just worked fine (it breaks on the Byfron client)
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Same,
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You shouldn’t just base it on Flathub downloads, some people don’t like how annoying it is almost like Snap packages. There are other places like Arch Linux’s AUR.
Not to mention how active Grapejuice’s Discord server is:
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Yes, I did mention distro packaging in my post as well.
I’m blind oops, sorry I had just woken up and speed read everything here from last night.
Glad to see Roblox engineers still responding.
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Yeah, as ex, I used the deb repository personally. I don’t think package/from source users will be as much as on Flathub, but it still stands that there’s a lot of users, a considerable amount being developers as well.
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