formerlytomatoHow is GOG Galaxy Still Not On Linux?
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.
DurandalIIRC 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?
MonstrosityGog 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.
Gog funds Heroic.
By some other means than affiliate link payouts? Can you link some details about the arrangement?
I read it somewhere awhile ago. You’re killing me asking for a source, goddamn.
Yes, that’s what I thought: It’s just affiliate linking (aka marketing) that any app can use, not a partnership between Heroic and GOG. Thanks for following up and confirming it.
Quoting /u/imLinguin in the post you linked:
Heroic dev here. We are just part of the affiliate program since we help people access GOG on Linux easier. There is nothing more, so there is no need for official announcements from the GOG side.
I’m glad you called me out on that. It’s easy to misremember when we are just constantly bombarded w information.
Anyways, it would be a good compromise, imo.
Curious what Gog’s actual hang up is, since the Steamdeck’s picking up so much momentum.
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.
Bad engineering
Are you updating Linux games from Windows??
How does your Windows install open the ext4/btrfs file system your Linux games are stored on?
im sorry i broke the codeBetter 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 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.
iusearchbtwannoyingly, heroic has no download throttling, very annoying for shared/shitty networks and large games
dreadbeefI’d put that as a feature request honestly, they’ll probably add that in at some point
If youe on Linux, you have a lot more options to affect the system. You could try running Heroic Launcher through trickle: unix.stackexchange.com/…/how-can-i-limit-the-band…
Ideally this would be implemented on the client side, i.e. Heroic Launcher, but there seems to some challenges in making that happen: github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/…/597
bit late to this, but trickle doesn’t work because heroic spawns new downloader processes unaffected by trickle’s limits
Hm, if it spawns some external process, would it be possible to wrap that in shell script of the same name, which turn calls the other one but through trickle?
talThere’s an open-source CLI client to download GOG games,
lgogdownloader. It’s packaged in Debian.
Maybe the author of the article/blog doesn’t know about Heroic?
They mention lutris, but note that it isn’t a functional equivalent to Galaxy. But as far as I’m aware, Heroic is (correct me if I’m wrong, I haven’t seen Galaxy in action).
sibachianI 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.
A Wild Mimic appears!That’s my experience too. Heroic looks nicer, but functionalitywise Lutris is far ahead, having support for EA’s and Ubisofts launcher as well. It’s also a lot more stable than Heroic.
Because GOG doesn’t want to support it. They’d rather the community do it.
MeldrikWe got Minigalaxy
stargazingpenguinI 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.
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.
We don’t need third party launchers to buy or play their games. Why do you want this?
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.”
Thanks for the reply. I appreciate you answering my question.
UlrichIf third party launchers were as good as the first party ones, we wouldn’t.
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.
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.
exuYeah, they promised Linux support years ago with Galaxy 2.0.
It’s basically the reason why I always prefer Steam for my games.
It’s basically the reason why I always prefer Steam for my games.
squid_slimeHeroic Games Launcher, supports gog cloud saves, full wine/proton integration and even store front.
ScrubblesAnd that’s amazing work they’ve done, but really it’s surprising that it’s not already supported natively.
What do you mean by natively?
ddhSupported by GOG
I think there is some … cooperation? Or at least acknowledgement towards heroic from GOGs side.
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.
xavier666Also, it has controller support (slightly dodgy though)
This is what keeps me on Steam, along with Steam Input and Big Picture
Lemmchen
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.
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
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.
I thought they said they’re not doing it now?
Rob T FireflyCDProjekt/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.
merdaverseTrue. 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
Random_Character_AI’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.