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Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update

gamingonlinux.com

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Re: Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update

#3
When my oldest kid was young, I was on Linux. I tried a few times to get it to work so I could play with him but never could get it to run quite right. Because I couldn't play with him, Roblox itself became a constant source of arguments. Hours-long shouting and crying kind of arguments. All discussion was around Robux and the ridiculous money-grabs everywhere in the ecosystem. For years, I absolutely hated Roblox because of it.

When my youngest started playing, my older kid immediately got through to him to forget about Robux and just play the games. By then, I was back on Windows and was able to play with him. We have tons of fun as a nightly routine and he's even using Roblox Studio to build cool stuff and even does a little bit of programming. I absolutely love it.

Re: Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update

#4
> Unfortunately this block was intentional. With the Windows 64-bit client launch we made the conscious decision to block the use of Wine.

> First and most importantly, we are not trying to punish the use of Wine.

Not punishing, but certainly showing a callous disregard for them.

You did this deliberately, and they had to come to the forums to find out?

Re: Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update

#5
post #2

Sounds like it's time to get familiar with the wine-staging options to hide wine-specific exports: https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/blob/b46dd63e024a16...

Where can I learn about Wine internals like these? I would love to debug why applications don't run well in wine, but all I ever find is an out of date wiki page and no clear explanation for how to start debugging these situations.

Maybe I'm not so good at finding the right resources?

Re: Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update

#6
post #2

Sounds like it's time to get familiar with the wine-staging options to hide wine-specific exports: https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/blob/b46dd63e024a16...

I doubt that any non-toy anti-cheat system can run on WINE and not notice that something isn't quite right.

Re: Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update

#7
post #2

Sounds like it's time to get familiar with the wine-staging options to hide wine-specific exports: https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/blob/b46dd63e024a16...

...and thus, the next round of the cat-and-mouse game begins.

Things like this will only make WINE's own compatibility and indistinguishability from Windows increase, so it's not all bad.

Re: Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update

#8
Apparently, this has been done because they're trying to collect telemetry on the use of the 64-bit client, and they want "pure" telemetry from the target OS, not the target OS and instances on other operating systems emulating the target OS (https://devforum.roblox.com/t/the-new-roblox-64-bit-byfron-c...).

I can see what they're trying to do here, but (a) I've never, personally, been of the opinion that this kind of shaping has the desired effect (if anything, I've seen users try harder to break the system when such an arbitrary block is put in place, which makes the resulting telemetry noisier) and (b) cutting your customer base to get "cleaner" numbers smells very shortsighted.

Re: Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update

#9
I wonder what's the core issue. Probably not it, but I've found that no Event Tracing support is there in wine (maybe I'm wrong) - so no .etw data from neither of the 3 or was it 4 apis to emit these. Just pointing out that sometimes missing one feature, not critical for games specifically, might be critical for another new system, and without it it might not function correctly. Again pure hypothesis. I'm curious though what it is...

Re: Roblox intentionally blocking Linux with Wine in their new update

#10
post #3

When my oldest kid was young, I was on Linux. I tried a few times to get it to work so I could play with him but never could get it to run quite right. Because I couldn't play with him, Roblox itself became a constant source of arguments. Hours-long shouting and crying kind of arguments. All discussion was around Robux and the ridiculous money-grabs everywhere in the ecosystem. For years, I absolutely hated Roblox be…

Everything on Roblox is gamified to suck as much money out of kids as possible.

When my kid was using Roblox several years ago, all the games were made by kids. Nowadays all of the game developers moved from phone apps to Roblox. There’s no way I’m letting my kid get addicted to their tactics which are very effective, especially on kids.

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