Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
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Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
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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.
Heroic Games Launcher, supports gog cloud saves, full wine/proton integration and even store front.
And that's amazing work they've done, but really it's surprising that it's not already supported natively.
I think there is some ... cooperation? Or at least acknowledgement towards heroic from GOGs side.
I used to purchase everything I could from GOG until I switched to Linux full time. I still like the company and buy some from them, but until they become more Linux friendly or Steam gets worse I'll still prioritize Steam now. And it's not only the (very odd) resistance to making a Linux version of Galaxy, I've also seen them not offer Linux versions of games even when the developers have released it on other platforms.
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.
Same here. I had nearly all the XCOM2 DLC purchased from GOG, and then Steam ran a sale on the bundle that was cheaper than buying the last piece to complete the collection! Since then I think GOG have run similarly cheap sales, but it wasn't the last time I saw that happen.
I know launchers like Heroic are available, and I use it for some of my games from them, but I actually liked the Galaxy launcher on Windows. I wasn't linking it to anything else though, so I didn't run into the issues you mention.
It's sad, because I think they could do well in the Linux community. Hopefully they eventually start supporting it, but until then I'll be buying most of my games from the company that's actively contributing and improving things for the community.
I've noticed that GOG usually runs their sales after Steam's sales (or maybe before? Either way, they're not in sync) and that it's usually all the same stuff on sale. I don't buy GOG anymore because Linux but back when I was still on Windows I would wait a week and buy from GOG where applicable.
Yeah, they promised Linux support years ago with Galaxy 2.0.
It's basically the reason why I always prefer Steam for my games.
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.
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.
IIRC GOG is actually partnered with HeroicLauncher... so.. it's semi official to use that... and better UX.
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.
~~Gog funds Heroic.~~
I actually think it's a fairly decent compromise (although I prefer Lutris), since Gog is clearly not interested in paying to maintain a Linux port.
EDIT: Wrong(ish)! See below.
Gog funds Heroic.
By some other means than affiliate link payouts? I'm not aware of any such arrangement, but if one exists, can you link some details about it?
I read it somewhere awhile ago. You're killing me asking for a source, goddamn.
EDIT: somewhat ironically, here's a Reddit thread where a developer says they are a part of the affiliate program, so, I don't know much funding that brings in. It sounds like a less formal arrangement than I was imagining:
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.
Are you updating Linux games from Windows??
How does your Windows install open the ext4/btrfs file system your Linux games are stored on?
Bad engineering
heroic has no download throttling, very annoying for shared/shitty networks and large games
If you're on Linux, you have a lot more options to affect the system. You could try running Heroic Launcher through trickle: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/34116/how-can-i-limit-the-bandwidth-used-by-a-process
Ideally this would be implemented on the client side, i.e. Heroic Launcher, but there seems to some challenges in making that happen: https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher/issues/597
I'd put that as a feature request honestly, they'll probably add that in at some point
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
This is what keeps me on Steam, along with Steam Input and Big Picture
It is UI for GOG? We have a Heroic Game Launcher. It can work with GOG.
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.
Imho, if they decide to put effort into Linux, I'd rather see them put dev resources into heroic to add these features than to make just another client. They are late to the market, that would make the most of it.
Because GOG doesn't want to support it. They'd rather the community do it.
There's an open-source CLI client to download GOG games, lgogdownloader. It's packaged in Debian.
You can use heroic I guess...
CDPR suck.
