Honestly what’s the point in having it? Heroic is already a better option. GOG Galaxy is a simple launcher, if they port it to Linux then it would also need to be a Wine/Proton prefix manager. Its not a massive amount of work, especially since umu-launcher exists now, but its just pointless effort IMO. Unless they’re willing to invest the same amount of work into it that has gone into Heroic and Lutris, it’ll just end up being the inferior option.
Use Heroic Games Launcher. It works very well.
tbf with heroic launcher starting to implement comet (galaxy api), it might not be needed anymore
It would certainly make me more likely to support GOG financially. At least fund its development.
I understand the devs profit from purchases made through Heroic to GOG, but I’d like to see something a little more explicit than what seems like an affiliate link.
Look at what happened when Epic brought a store to Windows
Those barriers still exist on Linux
GoG makes even less sense to have a launcher because you can just download off their website
Because it doesn’t make business sense to them. The author of the article makes just two arguments and assumes those are the only relevant arguments. There’s a lot more involved in the decision to port GOG Galaxy to Linux. Like support, for example.
Personally, since proton got so good and heroic can just use any version of proton installed, I’ve began to buy GOG games again and run them through heroic. 99% of the time they just run OK. But of course I do my due diligence and check protondb before making a purchase.
GOG doesn’t really do much to maintain the Galaxy app unfortunately. The idea of being able to put your entire library into one launcher is appealing but half of the plugins don’t even work. Even the steam one is broken out of the box these days (there is a newer version on GitHub, but I don’t think it’s official). So them not porting to Linux is unsurprising.
Galaxy came out hot, promised to offer something I’d wanted for a long time with a super clean UX, but from day 1 it just felt half-assed, like it was a project with two guys working on it in their spare time. A collosal disappointment.
Seriously, if one guy cooked it up during a hackathon and then later left the company, I wouldn’t be shocked.
I use GOG to get away from downloading things in the context of a store and have a nice little archive of installers to use whenever I want it. I am trying to get as many Steam games to just be that way so when I run the binary it just works without Steam being involved at all. Laughably few will do it on their own but there are some ways around others…
Yeah, quite happy without some bloated launcher, thanks.
This exactly.
I don’t want an extra launcher/downloader thing that keeps on running in the background.
When I want to play the game, I want to only have to start the game itself. That on top of the fact that Linux can have significantly less bloat than Windows, is a big +.
I even experimented with turning off plasma and playing the game directly in X11 without even a WM. Though it turned out not to make a big difference since the DE seems to be light enough to not be a problem.Even in case of Steam, the only times I want to have to run it is when I am opening the store or updating the games. Not when I just want to play it and definitely not for a Linux native game which does not require Proton nor the runtime.
but think of the achievements!!
Heroic handles them!
IIRC galaxy could download installers. Maybe I’m confusing it with the older gog client
Because cdpr is a joke. Like did you see cyberpunks release? All they care is about money they showed that with their rushed job. I haven’t claimed any free games on GOG because you have to sign up for their newsletter in order to claim the game. I still get spammed with emails from GOG even after unsubscribing after I receive every single email. At this point of just marked em’ as spam.
“rushed job”
8 years of development
I don’t know how CP77 turned out how it did, but it certainly wasn’t due to being rushed. Either way, they managed to fix it although it took like 2 years or something.
As for you still getting GOG emails… Git gud?? Unsubscribing from a service’s emails is the easiest thing in the world if you take roughly 2 seconds to make sure it’s done properly.
Yeah and I fucking unsubscribed and they keep sending me emails and then I unsubscribe again and then they keep sending me emails and then I unsubscribe again and then they keep sending me emails…
You picking up on it yet?
And it was in development longer than 8 years it got rumored I can 2011 or something and then the teaser was 2013 I think I forget hold up I’m fuzzy rn. But you can tell it’s a rushed product by the end result. if it needed more time it needed more time end of fucking story
Then you’re doing something wrong, simple as. I’ve completely unsubscribed from GOG emails and it was ez. Literally just in account settings.
As for Cyberpunk, it entered pre-pro in 2016 and released in 2020. https://www.destructoid.com/how-long-was-cyberpunk-2077-in-development/ So really 4 years, so maybe rushed given the scale tbh. If they had released in 2022 it might have been in a better state, so I’ll concede there.
Because Linux still makes up a small % of PC Gamers, so CDPR hasn’t prioritized it. Plus they’d need to have some kind of proton-like middleware (or just proton) for the majority of their games (which are mostly 15-20+ years old) to be playable. It seems like a large engineering challenge for a company which isn’t nearly as wealthy as valve
osx has an even lower market share (at least according to the steam survey), and they made one for it
Cyberpunk (and Witcher 3) already runs, and honestly way better then I expected, on my steam deck. They even have a specific graphics setting to accommodate for it’s obviously limited hardware, so CDPR are also aware people play their games on the steam deck.
Steamdeck is linux. Obviously this proton translation layer that is being leveraged is very capable.
For all intents and purposeses, CDPR is already where they need to be for half-decent Linux support and honestly I don’t understand why they didn’t already draw that last sprint that would be required to fully support this.
Well it’s not going to be the same engineering challenge as it was for Valve, because they only need to integrate proton, not develop it. If proton works on Lutris (via umu), an open source project with no corporate backing as far as I’m aware, surely CDPR can at least attempt it. This is probably the best time to do it, too. SteamOS has been well received and is likely to end up on even more handhelds, and Windows 10 is nearing its EoL. If GoG is one of the first storefronts to allow its users to play outside of windows it might generate a lot of positive sentiment in the community, just like they did with their anti-DRM stance.
Proton is open source, they could just use that. Valve would hardly complain as it helps more games run on steamdeck.
I want to use GoG more but they seem to increasingly not care about Linux. So I use Steam.
“This river doesn’t need a bridge because almost nobody ever crosses it.”
Also is there a reason they can’t just distribute proton? It’s open under BSD, so they’d be free to do it.
Gog is not in the bridge building business though
This is a valid rebuttal, as I was talking completely literally. I apologise, I thought they were a civil engineering and construction firm.
Then maybe they shouldn’t have publicly said they were planning to build this bridge ten years ago.
Anyone who knows how software companies work knows the pattern. One dude wants to do something and pushes hard for it and things get done. Then they leave the company / get promoted / move to a different part of the company and there is no more will to do said thing. The people in the company have forgotten about linux support 200 times already, and saying something 10 years ago won’t change that. Make linux be something regular gamers want to run, get a double digit adoption rate, maybe they’ll revisit it
Yes, they are unreliable. The fact that this is typical of software companies doesn’t excuse the behaviour or make it a sound business strategy.
You’re not actually arguing with what’s being said, you’re just normalising it.
What do you think this is? It’s a random post, not a debate. I’m not here to argue a point. No amount of “discussion” will reach them
So you have no point and should be ignored. Thanks for confirming that.
Then they should have kept it internal until they were ready to commit. People spent money with them as a result of that commitment, and it may not have been a large part of their customer base, but it is exactly the people they courted with the public statement. They wanted to make the announcement to reap the PR benefits, so now they need to follow through and deliver.
Or else what happens? The reality is nobody cares.
Heroic did it. Why couldn’t GOG?
CD Projekt is a public company, which would likely be cautious in relying on complex third-party tools like Wine.
Yep, no public company would ever use Apache, nginx, AWS. Those are all 3rd party tools.
They are third-party tools used by other thousands of companies.
Wine used to have no product built on top of it, and CodeWeavers is independent.
Most businesses rely on third party tools and software libraries. Particularly open source ones.
Valve isn’t public, but they seem to be making plenty off of WINE. In fact, companies of all types love building on other projects, because it reduces how much work they need to do.
They just don’t seem to care. They could literally hire someone who works on Heroic to make an official Galaxy port reusing most of Heroic’s functionality. Yet they don’t.
Because of the power of friendship… And open-source.
And caring about Linux…
I’ve been with linux for 20 years now and at one point GOG was the place to go, because DRM was one of the biggest problems with wine.
I downloaded all my games stopped using it after they came up with their own electronic store, which I thought was a horrible shit and very clunky on wine.
Steam and proton were rising at the same time and more and more games were working without the usual fuss of installing .dll files, obscure media codecs, .net and etc, so it was bye bye GOG.
I think the bigger complaint is that, when Galaxy was released, GOG said (back in 2015)
A Linux version of our client is planned eventually … Stay tuned for future announcements
Ten years is plenty of time to implement a launcher, or at least give a planned timeline
Sure, third parties have done it with Heroic, etc. but promising support and not delivering leaves a really bad taste to me
CDProjekt/GOG said the same thing about Cyberpunk 2077, their biggest product ever, and in the year 2025 I’m still running the Windows version of that through Proton because they give no fucks.
To be fair, you probably don’t want a native version anyways. Most native games i’ve played just required me to switch to proton because they had their own share of issues that the proton versions didn’t have.
At this point it’s better for devs to make proton support a goal(i.e steam deck compatibility) rather than native linux builds. Linux just has too much diversity for native linux support to not be a massive pain in the ass in my opinion.
True. I’ve had plenty of games where the native version didn’t work, but the Proton version worked flawlessly. Small devs can get more value for their time by aiming for Proton compatibility
Ten years is plenty of time to implement a launcher, or at least give a planned timeline
Or to give literally any kind of update, like admitting it was never seriously planned.
Marginal support happens a lot on Linux. See AMD drivers without Adrenaline. “You may use Linux if you must… at your own risk… we do the bare minimum to keep you runnig… our past stuff is in the open but we can pull the rug on future releases any time.” You can install gog games and maybe some dude made galaxy work in wine, corporate has decided that is good enough.
CDPR suck.
I agree, it was something I would have thought would happened a long, long time ago. Then a few years ago I thought for sure when steam and linux were really picking up.
It is one of the reasons I dont use gog that much.
