Just a high level comment on GOG, I am immensely grateful to them for existing and for sticking so strong to their principles against DRM, and for maintaining great customer service. I have bought a lot of games from GOG and have been very happy. As an exclusively Linux user, I also appreciate how well GOG works with Lutris et al and that they aren't making life harder for those devs. I love the offline installers and I deeply appreciate their availability.
I'm not a big gamer but after watching the industry and Linux/open source in general for many, many years, I'm more convinced than ever that it's the gaming community who will save general purpose computing (that's also a nod to Valve for everything they've done for Linux as well, which has been major).
Unfortunately, it is (very) hard to make non-native games from GOG work on Linux, as someone who just doesn't "grok" Wine. This is especially painful for me, because I have supported and want to support GOG, but my obscure point and click adventure games work out of the box with Proton on Steam, which is more than I can say about GOG games.
To this day, I have exactly one game that I have not managed to get working on my linux system: GRIS, bought from GOG. I tried everything suggested online, nothing worked. Since then (I still have not played GRIS), I tend to get stuff from Steam.
GoG games work just fine when installed with Heroic in Linux.
Demanding that a small shop fighting DRM now also funds support for your rare operating system is some massive entitlement, especially since there's plenty of ways to make them work now.
Every game clearly indicates whether it provides a Linux installer so there aren't any surprises there, and even in the cart you'll get a banner message saying something like, "Some of these games don't work on your operating system (Linux)" to avoid surprises.
You can even search the store filtering only for games that provide a Linux installer, which is a control I use regularly. It's disappointing how few games do offer that, but it's getting better everyday (for which I largely credit and thank Valve).
They don't support Linux with GOG Galaxy, but given they maintain compatibility with Lutris and Heroic and others I think I actually prefer that to official GOG Galaxy Support.
For example, Dead Cells offers daily challenges and has a few items locked behind completing them. They facilitate these by using the platform's tooling, which means the GOG version uses Galaxy and Linux users can't access it. And as far as I can tell, there's nothing on the site telling you this, troubleshooting the problem took a fair amount of digging.
A small thing, and I still opt for GOG over anything else, but it can be annoying.
It's probably outside their scope, and they are not as large and wealthy as Valve that they can afford to invest the necessary resources. But you can use 3rd party launchers like "Heroic" that support GOG and basically give you the same experience as Steam does.
FWIW they could piggyback on Valve's open source work and help there like Zoom Platform (DRM-free shop like GOG, unrelated to Zoom) did[0]. ZP is a much smaller company than GOG (pretty much everyone in it, including the CEO, hangs out on their official Discord) and they still got someone to handle that part. I don't use the utility myself but i've seen on Discord that they -try to- provide support for people using it.
I find that this is also the easiest way to get your games loaded into the SteamOS interface.
On my homemade NixOS SteamOS-like gaming box, I have it boot into the SteamOS interface, and it's pretty and console-like, and it's nice to be able to quickly install my GOG and Epic games and automatically add it to Steam so it can be easily played with that interface.
Not a perfect solution, but you could just use Steam to load games from GOG on Linux though. Thereby getting "the best of both worlds".
I have yet to stumble upon any major issue doing this.
Also, running other store launchers under Steam Proton works surprisingly well. I've been able to install Battle.net as a custom entry in Steam and run StarCraft II flawlessly in Linux.
I was thinking that way in the past. But then, the only stable ABI is the win32 one.
The linux kernel one is very stable, but the libs ones isn't.
As soon as the dev ensure and cooperates with wine/proton to make it work nicely, i'm game.
Needing those old libs in linux is rather cumbersome, if at all possible. So having wine doing the translation layer is a really good thing. As it frees the devs to be able to focus on 1 plateform.
I also noted that the switch enabled a lot of linux native ports. That's also a nice side effect.
Proton has gotten so good now that this is less of an issue to me. I buy games on GOG and just load them into Steam with Heroic.
I actually will often get better performance doing it this way; Jupiter Hell, for example, has a native Linux port, but I almost exclusively play the Windows version on Linux. I'm not entirely sure why this is, maybe performance issues with OpenGL compared to the D3D->Vulkan pipeline.
Linux has so much fragmentation between distros and the like, the Windows API is ironically one of the easiest ways to get stuff working consistently on Linux. If you're playing games on NixOS, for example, you have to do extra work to get Linux versions working a lot of the time because NixOS kind of breaks dynamic-linking by default. If you play the windows versions on NixOS, it's often as easy as `wine myGame.exe`.
Your Steam Deck provides Windows API emulation so games coded to target Windows will run on it. As a Steam Deck owner, you are perpetuating Windows gaming.
Now if only GOG could fix their Mac client so that you can actually quit it.
Maybe someone at GOG will actually read this and let a project manager to let a programmer know to fix this. Because they keep doing everything else other than fixing a really really annoying bug. We shouldn't have to force-quit apps!
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I'm not a big gamer but after watching the industry and Linux/open source in general for many, many years, I'm more convinced than ever that it's the gaming community who will save general purpose computing (that's also a nod to Valve for everything they've done for Linux as well, which has been major).
To this day, I have exactly one game that I have not managed to get working on my linux system: GRIS, bought from GOG. I tried everything suggested online, nothing worked. Since then (I still have not played GRIS), I tend to get stuff from Steam.
Lutris handles the wine config for me, works 99% of the time.
Demanding that a small shop fighting DRM now also funds support for your rare operating system is some massive entitlement, especially since there's plenty of ways to make them work now.
Have you spun up a SteamOS VM?
https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
They could put a permanent banner on their website, I'm sure that would bring in some signatures.
Every game clearly indicates whether it provides a Linux installer so there aren't any surprises there, and even in the cart you'll get a banner message saying something like, "Some of these games don't work on your operating system (Linux)" to avoid surprises.
You can even search the store filtering only for games that provide a Linux installer, which is a control I use regularly. It's disappointing how few games do offer that, but it's getting better everyday (for which I largely credit and thank Valve).
They don't support Linux with GOG Galaxy, but given they maintain compatibility with Lutris and Heroic and others I think I actually prefer that to official GOG Galaxy Support.
This is a bit of an issue.
For example, Dead Cells offers daily challenges and has a few items locked behind completing them. They facilitate these by using the platform's tooling, which means the GOG version uses Galaxy and Linux users can't access it. And as far as I can tell, there's nothing on the site telling you this, troubleshooting the problem took a fair amount of digging.
A small thing, and I still opt for GOG over anything else, but it can be annoying.
[0] https://zoom-platform.sh/
On my homemade NixOS SteamOS-like gaming box, I have it boot into the SteamOS interface, and it's pretty and console-like, and it's nice to be able to quickly install my GOG and Epic games and automatically add it to Steam so it can be easily played with that interface.
Windows gaming really needs to stop.
The linux kernel one is very stable, but the libs ones isn't.
As soon as the dev ensure and cooperates with wine/proton to make it work nicely, i'm game.
Needing those old libs in linux is rather cumbersome, if at all possible. So having wine doing the translation layer is a really good thing. As it frees the devs to be able to focus on 1 plateform.
I also noted that the switch enabled a lot of linux native ports. That's also a nice side effect.
I actually will often get better performance doing it this way; Jupiter Hell, for example, has a native Linux port, but I almost exclusively play the Windows version on Linux. I'm not entirely sure why this is, maybe performance issues with OpenGL compared to the D3D->Vulkan pipeline.
Linux has so much fragmentation between distros and the like, the Windows API is ironically one of the easiest ways to get stuff working consistently on Linux. If you're playing games on NixOS, for example, you have to do extra work to get Linux versions working a lot of the time because NixOS kind of breaks dynamic-linking by default. If you play the windows versions on NixOS, it's often as easy as `wine myGame.exe`.
Maybe someone at GOG will actually read this and let a project manager to let a programmer know to fix this. Because they keep doing everything else other than fixing a really really annoying bug. We shouldn't have to force-quit apps!
https://www.gog.com/forum/general_beta_gog_galaxy_2.0/macos_...