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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

Roblox is making them billions, so I don't buy that supporting a linux client would cost them too much money to be practical.

Honestly though, I hope they stay off linux and wine. I hope at least some gamers using linux will spend their time on other games. Maybe they'll find some games that aren't full of lootboxes that give children gambling addictions, other games that aren't designed to fill kids with insecurity and FOMO to pressure them into begging for money to spend on endless microtransactions, other games that aren't filled with massive amounts of advertising, other games that don't profit from child labor, or other games that aren't filled with sexual predators.

There are too many great games out there which aren't abusive and hostile to players (both children and adult) for me to be worried about what happens to a scummy game like roblox.

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Hot take, but it's a parental failure to let kids communicate in a meaningful way with strangers via games. This is why DS and Wii multiplayer were so interesting, you could play with strangers, but had canned responses for comms for the most part unless people added the friend code of each other, at which point they might be able to voice chat or use text. You could only share a friend code if you could communicate outside of the game.

Where there's the means to talk to kids properly, you'll find predators. That's a given.

It's also bold to assume that these are children playing Roblox on Linux, when they are in all likelihood actually adults.

I'm actually okay with parents letting kids communicate with strangers in games so long as it isn't unsupervised. I've known parents who'd play with their kids in MMORPGs without much issue. They might get exposed to some 'adult content', but as long as a responsible adult is around to contextualize provide guidance and stop things before they progress into something harmful it can be good.

I agree, canned responses are ideal if the play has to be unsupervised. Friend codes were frustrating though and a ton of people just posted them online where strangers could see them anyway.

This is what my mother thought and I grew up severely socially anxious and awkward, I was able to fix it in my adulthood with training and therapy, but please do not do this.

Are you really implying that because you grew up with a Nintendo console that you had problems socially? It sounds like a parenting failure.

If you believe your social interactions should have come from strangers via video games then that's abnormal.

Counterpoint: because my mother met her husband online in a chatroom, I spent most of my childhood talking to strangers. I was groomed online multiple times online. I was also sexually abused at three schools by teachers. A bunch of people me and my friends met off the internet were not who they purported to be whatsoever.

I'm still getting therapy in adulthood. I know what I'd have rather had happen.

It was a parenting failure for me too after the divorce of my parents.

But would supporting a Linux client bring in more money than it costs? I remember reading claims from other software projects that Linux was an insignificant percentage of their user base but a majority of their support tickets.

> Linux was an insignificant percentage of their user base but a majority of their support tickets.

It may be majority of their support tickets, since many ports are a pretty crappy job. Does it start up? Let's ship it and call it a day. Sometimes not even that (see also Witcher 2 for Linux drama).

For many projects, if they would provide the same quality/effort for their majority platform, whey would go under.

Looks stupid in my opinion to consider that they don't have to support it because of insignificant percentage of users. Because they are not really working Linux version or not for a long time. So you don't know how many users you would have and so if it's insignificant. And even if they are able to differentiate windows and wine users.

And for the majority of tickets, I guess it is mainly tickets like "please have a Linux version, please have a Linux version that starts!".

I hate this company so much, so much assholes, because I have kid that wants to play that and that it is a shame to tell him that he can't because you want him to be on a Linux computer or otherwise he will boot on windows just for that!

In addition, with a few news we can see that they are a little bit okay to abuse of children or have children abused if they can sell more robux...

At this point, if they don't change their course, my only wish for this company is for them to crash and burn!

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