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Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update

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It seems the days of using workarounds to play Roblox on Linux may be coming to an abrupt end, with the upcoming launch of their new client blocking Linux intentionally.

This new client appears to be undergoing testing, and users quickly noticed it wasn't working under the Wine compatibility layer on Linux. It seems the issue comes from Byfron, software for anti-cheat and anti-tamper that joined up officially with Roblox back in October 2022.

In reply to the forum post, a staff member for Roblox mentioned it is intentionally blocking:

Hello Jrelvas, Unfortunately this block was intentional. With the Windows 64-bit client launch we made the conscious decision to block the use of Wine. We came to this decision due to a combination of security and compatibility concerns. As a Linux user I am sure you understand the challenges of the Windows ecosystem. Wine is not officially supported but we are committed to working towards compatibility where possible. Unfortunately, I cannot provide a specific timeline for this support. However, I assure you that it remains a priority for our team.

It seems it may not be forever, going by what they said above and below as this new 64bit client is undergoing intense testing right now as they gather feedback, bug reports and crash logs. In a follow-up post, another staff member mentioned:

Thank you for your well thought out post. First and most importantly, we are not trying to punish the use of Wine.
Our Windows 64-bit client is in some regards quite different from the 32-bit client. We are currently gathering telemetry to analyze and hopefully fix existing issues and prevent future ones from popping up. For this process to work, it is of utmost importance to collect data from the [intended] target operating system. You will also find that we blocked the usage of VMs for the very same reason.

I hope this clarifies some of the thought process behind the blocking of Wine. As MrEaker mentioned before, Wine remains a priority for our team, and we are certainly not deaf to the voices of our community.

And they seem to have no plans to block Wine use at all with Roblox Studio.

You might be wondering why they can't simply filter out the unwanted Wine results, since they obviously detect it just fine. Another few posts from the Roblox staff attempted to clear it up, as they mentioned their client will crash "compromised processes intentionally" and since they're going through so many thousands of crash logs, it would be quite a nuisance to add more to it. Sounds like it's complicated in many parts.

If / when they issue an update that does allow Wine players on Linux back in, I'll let you know.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Regis_S Apr 23, 2023
Quoting: iskaputt
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: 1xokIt is sad that the children only find Windows and MacOS, if they can still get their hands on a desktop computer at all.

As far as possible, I equip all the children in my area with Linux computers (including Steam Deck). Modified Minecraft in particular runs much better on it than on Windows or MacOS.
Public education forces children to use microsoft products, microsoft office in particular. They teach chilren to use that, and require them to use that. I have no idea, why libre office is not used as the main office suite. I am not talking about rare cases with some excel built-in math functions, but 99.999999999% of cases, where libre office is good. That's why microsoft is so generous at providing "education" licences for free, of cheap price, so people don't even think or look for alternatives.

As much as I'm regularly telling myself "don't complain, LO is free software", LibreOffice is a !@#$%^& $#@! show. Unless it's some extremely basic stuff, I'm having issues with LO practically every time I try to use it for anything serious (and so do friends and colleagues). Doing a presentation for work with non-default layout? Have fun. Need SVG with hidden elements? Hope you're on that latest version. Doing anything remotely fancy in calc, like how about multiple data series in a chart with labels? Are you crazy? Creating (or god forbid hoping for it to already exist) a standardized letter layout in write? Good luck. Some of the issues I encounter have been a thing for years and sometimes you find comments from ages ago telling you "yeah, not a thing, but you can do this and that !@#$ backwards workaround". Doing stuff in LO is just way too often, way too unintuitive and cumbersome.

The current MS Office incarnation could be equally terrible or even worse (haven't touched it in many years), but I'd take 2010 era MSO over today's LO pretty much every day of the week.

What @PixelDrop wrote is very close to my experience in, sadly, too many cases. Have someone that is content with a browser, full stop? Great. My mother is happily running a Debian system as well (not like there are no problems with garbage abandoned printer drivers or anything...). Everyone else usually has one or more pieces of "functionality" (some software) for which it's impossible to find an equivalent on Linux.

Sorry for the rant, but LO touches a sore spot of mine and makes me appreciate the "WHY THE !@#$ IS THIS !@#% A THING" feelings I often have in my Linux life and usually successfully suppress after a short time.

Agree with you. I found that Onlyoffice work better for me.
Adutchman Apr 23, 2023
Quoting: iskaputt
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: 1xokIt is sad that the children only find Windows and MacOS, if they can still get their hands on a desktop computer at all.

As far as possible, I equip all the children in my area with Linux computers (including Steam Deck). Modified Minecraft in particular runs much better on it than on Windows or MacOS.
Public education forces children to use microsoft products, microsoft office in particular. They teach chilren to use that, and require them to use that. I have no idea, why libre office is not used as the main office suite. I am not talking about rare cases with some excel built-in math functions, but 99.999999999% of cases, where libre office is good. That's why microsoft is so generous at providing "education" licences for free, of cheap price, so people don't even think or look for alternatives.

As much as I'm regularly telling myself "don't complain, LO is free software", LibreOffice is a !@#$%^& $#@! show. Unless it's some extremely basic stuff, I'm having issues with LO practically every time I try to use it for anything serious (and so do friends and colleagues). Doing a presentation for work with non-default layout? Have fun. Need SVG with hidden elements? Hope you're on that latest version. Doing anything remotely fancy in calc, like how about multiple data series in a chart with labels? Are you crazy? Creating (or god forbid hoping for it to already exist) a standardized letter layout in write? Good luck. Some of the issues I encounter have been a thing for years and sometimes you find comments from ages ago telling you "yeah, not a thing, but you can do this and that !@#$ backwards workaround". Doing stuff in LO is just way too often, way too unintuitive and cumbersome.

The current MS Office incarnation could be equally terrible or even worse (haven't touched it in many years), but I'd take 2010 era MSO over today's LO pretty much every day of the week.

What @PixelDrop wrote is very close to my experience in, sadly, too many cases. Have someone that is content with a browser, full stop? Great. My mother is happily running a Debian system as well (not like there are no problems with garbage abandoned printer drivers or anything...). Everyone else usually has one or more pieces of "functionality" (some software) for which it's impossible to find an equivalent on Linux.

Sorry for the rant, but LO touches a sore spot of mine and makes me appreciate the "WHY THE !@#$ IS THIS !@#% A THING" feelings I often have in my Linux life and usually successfully suppress after a short time.

Fully agreed. The sad thing is: Onlyoffice is not much better because it lacks a lot of features. It also doesn't really want to fully embrace FOSS (see Nextcloud Onlyoffice support). It is to the point where I see Google Docs as the only true alternative which is incredably sad. I personally use Markdown and Latex, but you can't expect the average Joe to learn that
lucinos Apr 23, 2023
I kind of understand the difficulty they have to do what they should do but at least they could easily allow no cross platform multiplayer.


Last edited by lucinos on 23 April 2023 at 12:07 pm UTC
denyasis Apr 24, 2023
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: 1xokIt is sad that the children only find Windows and MacOS, if they can still get their hands on a desktop computer at all.

As far as possible, I equip all the children in my area with Linux computers (including Steam Deck). Modified Minecraft in particular runs much better on it than on Windows or MacOS.
Public education forces children to use microsoft products, microsoft office in particular. They teach chilren to use that, and require them to use that. I have no idea, why libre office is not used as the main office suite. I am not talking about rare cases with some excel built-in math functions, but 99.999999999% of cases, where libre office is good. That's why microsoft is so generous at providing "education" licences for free, of cheap price, so people don't even think or look for alternatives.

In the USA, that's not exactly accurate. Google owns K-12. Microsoft's strategy is to pick them up for university and beyond. That said, you are very right for university and beyond are definitely Microsoft's world. And for good reason....

Quoting: iskaputt
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: 1xokIt is sad that the children only find Windows and MacOS, if they can still get their hands on a desktop computer at all.

As far as possible, I equip all the children in my area with Linux computers (including Steam Deck). Modified Minecraft in particular runs much better on it than on Windows or MacOS.
Public education forces children to use microsoft products, microsoft office in particular. They teach chilren to use that, and require them to use that. I have no idea, why libre office is not used as the main office suite. I am not talking about rare cases with some excel built-in math functions, but 99.999999999% of cases, where libre office is good. That's why microsoft is so generous at providing "education" licences for free, of cheap price, so people don't even think or look for alternatives.

As much as I'm regularly telling myself "don't complain, LO is free software", LibreOffice is a !@#$%^& $#@! show. Unless it's some extremely basic stuff, I'm having issues with LO practically every time I try to use it for anything serious (and so do friends and colleagues). Doing a presentation for work with non-default layout? Have fun. Need SVG with hidden elements? Hope you're on that latest version. Doing anything remotely fancy in calc, like how about multiple data series in a chart with labels? Are you crazy? Creating (or god forbid hoping for it to already exist) a standardized letter layout in write? Good luck. Some of the issues I encounter have been a thing for years and sometimes you find comments from ages ago telling you "yeah, not a thing, but you can do this and that !@#$ backwards workaround". Doing stuff in LO is just way too often, way too unintuitive and cumbersome.

The current MS Office incarnation could be equally terrible or even worse (haven't touched it in many years), but I'd take 2010 era MSO over today's LO pretty much every day of the week.

What @PixelDrop wrote is very close to my experience in, sadly, too many cases. Have someone that is content with a browser, full stop? Great. My mother is happily running a Debian system as well (not like there are no problems with garbage abandoned printer drivers or anything...). Everyone else usually has one or more pieces of "functionality" (some software) for which it's impossible to find an equivalent on Linux.

Sorry for the rant, but LO touches a sore spot of mine and makes me appreciate the "WHY THE !@#$ IS THIS !@#% A THING" feelings I often have in my Linux life and usually successfully suppress after a short time.

.... Because this. I make presentations in LO for when I teach. I export them all to PDF. That way I can actually use them regardless of OS. Everything has a PDF viewer that does full screen and most clickers work just fine with them.

I used to do data analysis. Its been 3-4 years, but Calc' Pivot Table implementation is just not good compared to Excel. And it's just not the office suite. There isn't a good alternative to SQL Server Management Studio or ArcGIS Pro. Comparatively, there just aren't the resources being put into the FOSS stuff as there are going into these big enterprise suites.

And I don't think it's totally fair to expect that from the Linux community either. If the goal is broad adoption and support of the Linux Desktop, I think we have to accept that some niche or advanced stuff just won't be there.
Eike Apr 24, 2023
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Quoting: sprocketIf you haven't seen this video on the subject, and you have children, you need to see this video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ

Plus the follow up, which is quite damning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY

I had no idea. Thanks for pointing out!
twinsonian Apr 25, 2023
Do a youtube search for Roblox most evil company in the world. The video is eye-opening. I have blocked the game in our house and talked with my son about it. It is popular because it exploits and addicts kids and digital laws havent caught up to this practice yet to protect them.
preludelinux Apr 26, 2023
After doing some research i dont see why any parent would even let there child use this product its complete garbage and maybe we should work to make a competing product. The kicker to all this is the game is making a ton of cash while exploiting all there users while also endangering children into a dangerous environment.

Quoting: twinsonianDo a youtube search for Roblox most evil company in the world. The video is eye-opening. I have blocked the game in our house and talked with my son about it. It is popular because it exploits and addicts kids and digital laws havent caught up to this practice yet to protect them.
PixelDrop Apr 27, 2023
Quoting: twinsonianDo a youtube search for Roblox most evil company in the world. The video is eye-opening. I have blocked the game in our house and talked with my son about it. It is popular because it exploits and addicts kids and digital laws havent caught up to this practice yet to protect them.

I'd say https://www.manticoregames.com/ is the closest thing coming up that could complete with Roblox since it's basically the same idea, but build ontop of Unreal Engine.
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