GOG previously said they planned to look closer at Linux, and that it was the next major frontier - and they're now working towards GOG Galaxy on Linux.
In the interim, Heroic Launcher is a viable alternative on Linux, since it’s got integration with GOG and a wine/proton manager built in. So it’ll automatically download the game and set up the prefix. It also does the same for Epic, but who give a shit about them.
I haven’t found a GOG client for Linux that’s as easy as Steam. They all require some kind of fiddling. Some games that should work, just don’t. I don’t bother with those and I just pretend they don’t exist. I play those that just work out of the box. I’ve tried Lutris, Heroic and Faugus.
To be fair, that’s just GoG’s problem itself. GoG refuses, for some reason, to require developers to ship version-agnostic versions of their game so half the games are stuck in time with library requirements from a decade ago it expects your system to provide. Which it doesn’t. And because these are third-party installers and not from the package manager they can’t request the package manager to install the library versions they need. And even if they could most distros explicitly will not allow that given the security risk of using outdated libraries.
This could be solved by breaking the linux philosophy and just require the older insecure libraries to be included with the games; which is the most accurate to their mission statement of preserving and archiving old games, but that requires people on their technical teams, their publisher liaison teams, and probably their legal teams all to understand linux well enough to have that as a hard requirement with minimal to no legal liabilities.
yeah Heroic is how I play my GOG games on Linux, and also the Epic freebies I’ve picked up.
Actually as a game launcher, I prefer Heroic to Steam - if only because of the instant start-up.
I’m kind of bored of Steam and its 60-second start-up time. Most of it is Steam waiting for network connectivity so it can confirm your account validity and connecting to Friends servers, which Heroic doesn’t have to worry about.
In the interim, Heroic Launcher is a viable alternative on Linux, since it’s got integration with GOG and a wine/proton manager built in. So it’ll automatically download the game and set up the prefix. It also does the same for Epic, but who give a shit about them.
I haven’t found a GOG client for Linux that’s as easy as Steam. They all require some kind of fiddling. Some games that should work, just don’t. I don’t bother with those and I just pretend they don’t exist. I play those that just work out of the box. I’ve tried Lutris, Heroic and Faugus.
To be fair, that’s just GoG’s problem itself. GoG refuses, for some reason, to require developers to ship version-agnostic versions of their game so half the games are stuck in time with library requirements from a decade ago it expects your system to provide. Which it doesn’t. And because these are third-party installers and not from the package manager they can’t request the package manager to install the library versions they need. And even if they could most distros explicitly will not allow that given the security risk of using outdated libraries.
This could be solved by breaking the linux philosophy and just require the older insecure libraries to be included with the games; which is the most accurate to their mission statement of preserving and archiving old games, but that requires people on their technical teams, their publisher liaison teams, and probably their legal teams all to understand linux well enough to have that as a hard requirement with minimal to no legal liabilities.
We already have AppImages or Flatpaks if they wanted to go that route.
AppImages would probably be the better solution in this case.
App images make modding much harder depending on the app, and flatpaks practically remove that as an option.
yeah Heroic is how I play my GOG games on Linux, and also the Epic freebies I’ve picked up.
Actually as a game launcher, I prefer Heroic to Steam - if only because of the instant start-up.
I’m kind of bored of Steam and its 60-second start-up time. Most of it is Steam waiting for network connectivity so it can confirm your account validity and connecting to Friends servers, which Heroic doesn’t have to worry about.