With the year being 2017 and gaming on Linux gaining foothold in the vastly growing PC gaming market, we hereby present you with a petition to be delivered to Riot Games, in order for them to consider bringing their beloved franchise, League of Legends, onto the Linux gaming platform. Below are just some of the points to consider for Riot Games upon making their decision.

On 20th April 2017, there was a debate on League of Legends subreddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/66k4oo/riot_support_on_linux_client_hopefully_in_the/dgj8f34/

There were a lot of misconceptions in regards to supporting Linux expressed from the Riot employees (having to support numerous distributions, porting having a huge cost, there being no demand amongst Linux users, dual booting being just as effective as having a native client, testing requiring loads of resources, etc). Our community members have decided to express their points about the misconceptions in this text and make a petition for release of the League of Legends Linux client.

Positives:

Great demand amongst Linux users (petition)

Free (as in freedom) and open-source Platform, not controlled by huge companies (people have the freedom to choose distribution, desktop environment, user experience that they like…), on Windows they have to “go with the MS’s flow” if they wish to remain playing League of Legends whether they like the changes or not

People can build their PC and just put a free of charge OS on their machine, and therefore lowering the starting price of their PC setup for playing League, if they wish, the choice to install Windows 10 is still theirs

Good drivers recently from both Nvidia and AMD, with stock performances of OpenGL and Vulkan on par with their Windows counterparts

Linux has proven to be a very viable gaming platform (example: 3000+ linux-native games on Steam, GOG games free of DRMs, a lot of them having on-par performance with their Windows counterparts)

Increase in Linux users during last year according to many different OS statistics sites

Support open standards - Adobe Air is not involved with the client anymore, all the needed dependencies are already available on Linux natively (HTML, JS, CSS, OpenGL, Vulkan for the future?…)

League of Legends already works via WINE compatibility layer, but the performance varies between devices (from very good to non-playable) and both WINE and LoL updates tend to break the support regularly

Using Ubuntu as a “standard” provides good fundamentals for League of Legends Linux client, avoiding the pain of bringing the game across hundreds of different distributions. Other distributions would just repackage the files provided by Riot in their own preferred distributing format without the need for Riot to support it.

Porting itself would not require much work and resources with all the dependencies available on Linux, mostly only re-linking the libraries. Official support could be a bit more resource-heavy but we have a few solutions for Riot in that regard (refer to " SOLUTIONS " section under the Cons list)

" section under the list) Testing of Linux clients is FREE - the community is full of tech-savvy people willing to help on the platform specific troubleshooting in contrast to the Windows community. Open betas would be a great way to keep the League client tested and working without many resources dedicated for internal testing

People who use Linux have a lot of friends playing League of Legends and providing an official client would keep us integrated into the community, spending more time playing and less time configuring wine prefixes

With previous point said, “Linux users can just dual boot” is not a valid point from Riot employees (reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/66k4oo/riot_support_on_linux_client_hopefully_in_the/dgj8f34/ Windows has the cost that is not even small and people do not like to be forced to dedicate 50 GB of their drive storage for another operating system in order to run a single game

Windows 7 and Win 8.1 support is running out in no-time (Windows 7 EOL- January 14, 2020 || Windows 8.1 EOL - January 10, 2023), Windows 10 is not a suitable alternative for all of the userbase, primarily because of the forced update system and a few other points mentioned below

Windows 10 is changing into an OS full of advertisements and bloatware, becoming more and more closed down by Microsoft which endangers the freedom and openness of the platform for the future

Microsoft and DirectX have clearly shown that they are choosing the path of exclusivity with DX12 by making it exclusive to Windows 10 and not even providing it on their “supported” Operating Systems - Windows 7, 8.1

The rise of Vulkan API (available cross-platform: Linux, Windows 7, 8.1, 10, Android) - in less than half a year, the number of games supporting the API went from 4 to 20. Considering how new the API is and that it is implemented across game engines, it shows that it is getting adopted pretty well, in contrast to DX12, which has been out for a few years already and while there are a few DX12 games, only Microsoft Studios’ games are DX12 exclusives.

Negatives:

Some resources from Riot Games would need to be dedicated to the support of the client

SOLUTIONS:

A mid-way solution would be from Riot Games to release a “beta” client which would not need active official support and would remain in that phase as long as Riot Games would be comfortable enough to make it official

An official wine wrapper that would free us from the pain of updates breaking the game on pre-configured WINE prefixes

Misc. reasoning:

Leagu of Legends' game-client is no longer tied-down by AdobeAIR platform. The current client runs on Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), which heavily utilizes HTML5 code base. The same engine is used by Valve on their Steam platform which is natively supported on the Linux platform

Once delivered, we sincerely hope that Riot Games will come to a conclusion which would benefit both parties - more player-base plus funding for Riot Games and another great title to play for the Linux gamers across the globe.