Well, there it is, the update for Roblox has arrived that now forcefully blocks it from working with Wine on Linux systems (like Steam Deck).
It's been a bit of a saga hasn't it? Roblox has always been somewhat iffy to play on Linux, at times being broken while people working on the likes of Grapefruit and Vinegar repeatedly kept up with changes to make it work. The Roblox developers then introduced Hyperion anti-cheat software, although they continued to make it work unofficially with Wine but that wasn't to last as a developer explained that it has caused cheating.
Now if you try to run it, you will simply be told "Wine is not supported.":
This is an intentional change by the Roblox dev team, to block Wine, as noted in the previous article linked above where a Roblox developer clearly replied to note it wouldn't work in future.
Despite what you may think of Roblox (and it's historically had plenty of problems) as one of the biggest gaming platforms ever, it's certainly a shame to see it go. There's plenty of people out there that have Roblox as their main thing, and so not being able to do it on Linux is quite a loss.
Any game that intentionally prevents it from working on Linux is a loss as it just increases the uphill battle Linux has as a gaming platform. There's not exactly many accessible alternatives to it for Linux fans.
Know any alternatives for people looking? Let readers know in the comments.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
BlackBloodRum Mar 1
It really feels like a false reason. I mean, don't you find it ironic devs will turn around and say "We won't provide a Linux build because the Linux market is too small!" followed by "We are blocking Linux because there are too many people on Linux cheating!". Well, make up your mind because both sets of the OS's cheaters are a small subset of that OS's users.
Last edited by BlackBloodRum on 1 March 2024 at 3:41 pm UTC
Quoting: BlackBloodRumI've always found this "Wine causes cheating" to be a bit of an excuse. The majority of cheat software is made specifically for Windows and in-turn windows games. They make these claims, but never back it up with anything other than saying "we just know".
Although for me it also looks a bit of an excuse, their rationale here is: people are using wine to debug Roblox and with that knowledge come up with cheats that are then used on Windows.
Quoting: BlackBloodRumdon't you find it ironic devs will turn around and say "We won't provide a Linux build because the Linux market is too small!" followed by "We are blocking Linux because there are too many people on Linux cheating!". Well, make up your mind because both sets of the OS's cheaters are a small subset of that OS's users.Not really, no, since both metrics have different target numbers (as few cheaters as possible, as many buyers as possible). If Linux as a platform is bringing in a disproportionate amount of cheaters while providing a disproportionately low amount of income, it’s entirely logical to say that the market is too small to invest in it and has too many problematic users to keep supporting it in spite of it not being particularly profitable.
But when devs give shit to Linux, what sould we do? Yeah, just put these devs in the hall of infamy of the companies that are actively hostile towards our OS. Roblox devs can go to hell.
NathanaelKStottlemyer Mar 1
Quoting: BlackBloodRumI've always found this "Wine causes cheating" to be a bit of an excuse. The majority of cheat software is made specifically for Windows and in-turn windows games. They make these claims, but never back it up with anything other than saying "we just know".
It really feels like a false reason. I mean, don't you find it ironic devs will turn around and say "We won't provide a Linux build because the Linux market is too small!" followed by "We are blocking Linux because there are too many people on Linux cheating!". Well, make up your mind because both sets of the OS's cheaters are a small subset of that OS's users.
they needed to disable a lot of functions in their anticheat to don't trigger in wine, and in turn it made easier to make anticheats in windows(because of the disable functions) that why, is a good excuse, sad, but it's true
Quoting: EhvisWhy would that be? I'm not a mac person, but I highly doubt that Apple would make it easy for software to run something at elevated permissions. So maybe the mac built is running with the same restricted "anti-cheat" as they did to support wine. If that is the case, some of these cheaters may just move over to try their luck on a mac. Maybe not as many since that would require a fairly significant investment.
The thing to remember is that "anti-cheat" isn't really anti-cheat at all; it's anti-tamper. They want to know that the software and environment that it's running in hasn't been modified to do anything unexpected. On Windows, you've got a fairly standardised environment, but the broad range of hardware means that you need the ability to load, for example, hardware drivers... so people can load a "driver" that's actually modifying the running environment of user software. So the software developers put their anti-tamper software at the kernel level to be able to check on all the drivers as well as the user software. Macs have a hugely reduced breadth of hardware, so drivers can just come from Apple, and there's a built-in attestation mechanism to say that software hasn't been tampered with. They just use that. On Linux, every OS install is a special snowflake, so you don't even have a baseline standard environment to look for deviations from.
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