How is GOG Galaxy Still Not On Linux?

IIRC galaxy could download installers. Maybe I'm confusing it with the older gog client

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.

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.

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 as evidenced by this graphics setting.

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.

"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.

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.

Heroic did it. Why couldn't GOG?

Also, it has controller support (slightly dodgy though)

It's also a nice way to use a single launcher to replace 2 / 3 (Epic Games, GOG Galaxy and Amazon gaming).

On Linux I only use Steam and Heroic.

And that's amazing work they've done, but really it's surprising that it's not already supported natively.

And Linux versions taking over a week longer to update than the steam ones. I refunded a game over that before and got it on steam instead.

I tried to push for GOG purchases too and then I just ended up with games that would receive updates late. I'd miss out on discounts and bundles that make future purchases cheaper, at some point it was cheaper to just rebuy stuff with DLCs on Steam than continue building up the library on GOG.

I also gave their galaxy client a try since it promised a united library for all platforms and then they did a horrible job managing the plugins for other stores - they constantly kept breaking or logging me out while even Playnite worked perfectly out of the box.

In the end I just stopped wasting energy on GOG, life is too short and complicated enough. If they have a good deal on old games I might grab it, otherwise I prefer anything else.

Affiliate links are not business partnerships. Does Heroic have anything more than that with GOG?

EDIT: The answer is no, GOG is not partnered with Heroic Games Launcher.

Better UX until you have to download or update a game… there is an open bug report where it just doesn't progress but keeps starting new processes until you‘re OOM. Still no fix in months, I've had to boot into Windows for every single update. Really not that good of an UX.

heroic has no download throttling, very annoying for shared/shitty networks and large games

I wouldn't call HGL a better UX. It straight up doesn't work for me. When it did, I couldn't get games to install or update and had to DL manually in browser, install into some other Wine prefix, and then manually move the files to an HGL-generated prefix. The UI looks nicer but it's not nearly as straightforward as Galaxy's. It's more like Lutris in its complexity, though I imagine there's no easy way around that.

Better UX is a big word, as any unofficial launcher it kinda sucks because it doesn’t have a specific feature set. Besides, first party support is always better

That's neat to learn

I get into this on the post, but AFAIK community-built solutions such as Heroic and Lutris aren't exactly the same, with a lot of Galaxy's selling points being the cloud features such as save data sync and a friends list system for online play.

Different people may or may not find uses for these features, but it's still worth discussing IMO.

There are also GUI launchers that can download from GOG:

https://sharkwouter.github.io/minigalaxy/

https://lutris.net/about

"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.

Besides what the other person said, there's also the whole treating Linux users as second class citizens. If they didn't had a launcher for Windows, then it wouldn't be that big of a problem, but the fact that they did created a launcher for Windows years ago and porting it to Linux has been the most upvoted feature request since then and they haven't done it is a slap in the face of a community that shares a lot of their beliefs. Valve is investing money on making Linux gaming a reality, GoG won't even port their launcher to Linux, despite not caring for a launcher I know who I'm giving my money.

I like having all my games in one place, on a platform where Linux “just works” and I don’t have to fuck around with it.

Eliminating third-party launchers sounds great in theory until you have 20 different half-baked second party launchers that serve no purpose other than being a barrier between me and the games.

You may not agree, but some people actually like the platform integration features that Galaxy and Steam and the like provide. Cloud sync and achievements and things that you may not care about are important to other people.

And then there's just the whole "They said they would, and this is not very reassuring about their commitment to Linux users."

If third party launchers were as good as the first party ones, we wouldn't.

I found Heroic today. Same games that won't run on Lutris won't run on Heroic either. The biggest disappointment was that it crashed a few times and I gave up entirely when it froze up. I'm not saying Lutris is flawless, it certainly isn't, but my experience overall has at least been acceptable.