Time to stop being excited (GOG not supporting Linux)

I wrote that comment on GOG about "JUST ASK"(tm?). It *is* that simple to get the ball rolling.

All they have to do to start is say "Hey - we'll support the DOS box games to start. Here's a forum, here's a .tar.gz of the dos files. Please submit instructions for various distros on how to get dosbox and/or gameX working and we'll post it in a support site/wiki/something".

Within a day, I'd bet they assign some wiki editors for this to compile the docs (and probably be overwhelmed :) ). BUT - *they* have to:

Take files they already have, and make .tar.gz of them.
*JUST ASK* for assistance
Compile the docs/how-to's/etc that the community will provide.

Heck, they could even go the route of "Hey - we'll trial this for DOS games. We'll provide the basics, you guys provide the instructions". Again, not hard. Just some time invested on both sides.

Starting with the DOS games makes it super easy for GOG and Linux users:

DosBox is already well established in Linux, so dependency suprises should be kept to a bare minimum.
There's plenty of existing DOS items in GOG to use.
Providing a .tar.gz of the game files is lower cost than packaging the game with a tweaked DosBox.
There are already Linux users buying DOS games there (albeit not officially sanctioned).
GOG can get a great feel for how this could go while having a pretty easy out.

That last point probably needs some clarification. If for some reason GOG thinks the venture is worth it, neither party is really left in the lurch - existing doc's could be made downloadable and .tar.gz (or even just .zip) still left as an option to DosBox users. (To be honest, if it wasn't going to work out, I would guess they'd simply leave it at DosBox games being 'best effort' supported and let the community police it's own issues.)

Any doc's can be moved to another forum or made downloadable.

Also, while I'm sure people would be upset that 'official' support for Linux DosBox compatible games were dropped, they really would not be worse off than before. Probably a bit better (since there were at least some doc's now).

Does all this take some thought to actually put into action? Yes.
Does it take GOG working with the community and vice-versa? Yes.
Will it take time to fully work out? Yes.
Is it hard? Nope.

Don't accept the 'it's too hard' excuse. Call it out as 'BS'. Companies like GOG just need to understand we'll help make it easy if they would 'JUST ASK'.

I mean, really, 7000+ customers basically stating "here, take my money" and they reply "oh, no...that would be too hard".

Ah, sure wish you had put it that way in your comment. It makes much more sense.
Still, there are a few things that are wrong - to me, at least.
* Community support? Fine and dandy. But it's still no support. Not sensu stricto, at least. Saying "got a problem? Check that with the community, we don't got nothing to do with that" isn't exactly professional. You can't blame GOG for not trusting the community either. The communities are full of helpful people, people who know their way around the system... But also full of noobs, and a handful of trolls. Not good enough.
* DOSBox .tar.gz - can't say I disagree with you on this particular point. Though I'm not certain you won't have people crying out loud that they want proper packaging and a ppa and then some. And maybe even some money too. May sound sarcastic, but it happens a bit too often. And some people couldn't ldd a binary to save their own life. Not sure they're not one and the same too. I tend to think .tgz is THE way to go as it's universal, where packages aren't, but how many don't?
* Then there are the OTHER games. Indies? Sure, enough of them have native binaries out there. But people will probably come on the GOG forums for support. If only the devs can solve it, there's no guarantee they'll be checking the forums often enough... Which may - and probably will, as GNU/Linux isn't exactly the engineer's hobby OS anymore - lead to further frustration. Then there's WINE. And the rest.
* GOG, as you say, is a company. They won't take "go to the community forum". Heck, I wouldn't. I want a SPOC. SomeONE I can trust. SomeONE I can build a commercial relationship with. That is ONE person or a relative small group of people. A helpdesk, one may say. Because tons of people can click on the shiny icons, half of those people are able to copy/paste weird lines in the black window and a quarter of those people are able to write said weird things themselves doesn't make them a SPOC. It doesn't make them a POC at all. As helpful as they may be. When GOG files a bug that impacts 85% of distro X users, they want it to be treated as it is: a P1 ticket, solved ASAP with strict SLA, with someone who can keep them updated on how things are going and can be held accountable if it turns into a PR nightmare.
* They *DO* have to support multiple distros. Saying it's unneeded is saying "who gives a f*** what version of windows?'. A Win7 won't have the same issues as a Vista or an XP. Heck, I'm willing to bet a good chunk of my pay your kernel isn't my kernel. I'd probably win.
All that you propose isn't bad either, mind you. But it would only be good enough for unofficial support. And are the publishers GOG works with willing to support THAT? Heh. Ubisoft doesn't even know how to treat customers right, and you expect them to understand such a thing as "unofficial, unsupported versions"? :|

Community behaviour is a major problem, since one never knows what might happen. Although the GOG forums are extremely well behaved so far, and I just can't see that changing.

I still don't understand why can't they just have a .zip/.tgz alongside the .exes. I hate the fact that they need to be installed to be unpacked right now, which means if I suddenly decide to install a game, I have to have wine.

And about multiple distros - maybe just the biggest ones? Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE. That should provide enough coverage in packages that everyone will be happy, and then it's solved. Three distros is still much easier than three Windows versions.

Maybe in the meantime, we could get a nice wiki going, and just provide best configs, share launchers and tips on running the games. Would it be possible for one to start such a thing? Perhaps PCGamingWiki would be of some help, or maybe one of the porters that runs multiple wikis for Linux users about games? I'd gladly contribute by writing, testing and getting others on board, if we can get the ball rolling.

Quoting: "Anon, post: 5796"Community behaviour is a major problem, since one never knows what might happen. Although the GOG forums are extremely well behaved so far, and I just can't see that changing.

That much is true. But then again, there's no telling who the 7000 voters are, for starters, and how they'd interact. I know I haven't used the forums so much, I probably would if GNU/Linux support happened and would certainly help where I can, as best I can, but what of others?

QuoteI still don't understand why can't they just have a .zip/.tgz alongside the .exes. I hate the fact that they need to be installed to be unpacked right now, which means if I suddenly decide to install a game, I have to have wine.

They don't. Just install innoextract, and run innoextract ./setup_game.exe :)

QuoteAnd about multiple distros - maybe just the biggest ones? Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE. That should provide enough coverage in packages that everyone will be happy, and then it's solved. Three distros is still much easier than three Windows versions.

Mmh... Yes, no, maybe. I don't have a problem with it. I'm a tinkerer at heart, so anything would do. I see a hint of a problem though. No offense, but Ubuntu pretty much hosts both chaff and wheat. I don't know about SuSE. Fedora's more for the happy regular user in my experience. How do we distribute? .deb/.rpm? Puh-lease, no. You may support only those officially, but you can't be unaware that others exist. Plus, you're forcing people to install in a predetermined folder, usually with admin rights. Maybe I'm a grumpy old fool, but a "portable" version, inno installer, good ol' sh with tgz, anything would be better. You'll find just as many who'd rather have packages. How do we solve that? Three versions? Thrice the work. :/

QuoteMaybe in the meantime, we could get a nice wiki going, and just provide best configs, share launchers and tips on running the games. Would it be possible for one to start such a thing? Perhaps PCGamingWiki would be of some help, or maybe one of the porters that runs multiple wikis for Linux users about games? I'd gladly contribute by writing, testing and getting others on board, if we can get the ball rolling.

That would be a good thing, regardless of whether GOG sees it, acknowledges it and thinks about it. But don't forget that GOG is a business and has partners. It doesn't just depend on them. I sincerely think they need professional support before they can get this rolling. Not just for themselves, but also because a community isn't good enough for the fools out there who allow GOG to distribute their games. Seriously, I feel everyone's shooting the messenger here. ;)

The thing is, this obviously can be done; Desura is already doing it in fact. But I do agree that just saying "the community will solve all problems" is a bit of a misnomer. I also think that it is actually not that difficult to get support ready on Linux, but at the same time you have to be realistic and handle it in a proper and professional way. What we need now more than anything is for a proper professional to step in a show them how it should be done, rather than just the screaming of the community.

Tim Schafer's words come to mind:

QuoteLinux was like a party that sounded fun [but] we were afraid to go to because we didn’t think we’d know anybody there, and the HiB guys were like your socially fearless friend who says, “Don’t worry, we’ll go together.” When he gets to your house he says: “Is that what you’re wearing?” and you say, “uh…” and he says, “Don’t worry. I know a guy.” And he lends you a cool leather jacket and you go to the party and when you walk in there’s a needle scratch and everybody turns to look at you and your friend gives a cool nod and then everybody goes back to the party. So kind of like a John Hughes film. Hope that helps explain things. That’s about as technical as I can go. I just hope I don’t accidentally knock over a beer can pyramid that some tough guys are building. Oh and also, if you want to be cool at the party, stay away from wine. (haha! Linux joke!)

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/06/humble-bundle-devs-talk-gaming-on-linux

I think that basically sums everything up quite nicely. Just replace HIB with whoever has the knowledge and experience to step in and fill this particular void.

Yeah, Tim Schafer has probably summed it up best, but I feel like the story is different for storefronts like GOG or Steam. His quote is pretty accurate for all indies though.

Still, to a certain extent, GOG has relied on the community to do those things, and then sometimes officially integrated the features. Could we not potentially just try doing a wiki for the sake of other users? We might be able to see then some actual numbers in regards of Linux users on GOG.

This is what I'm referring to. GoL is just a part of the Linux gaming community and already a handful of people here are asking "what if we just did a wiki?".

The community can and will step up if asked. If nothing else, it's a great way to get the ball rolling.

I do agree that leaving everything to the community may not best for the long run. However, it's a fine way to start and one that I think the Linux customers of GOG would be happy to start with.

Beemer

For all of you talking about starting a wiki: there already is [URL='http://gogwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page']a community operated GOG.com wiki[/URL] and while it's not Linux-specific, the [URL='http://gogwiki.com/wiki/GOGWiki:Standard_product_page_layout']product page template[/URL] has a section unofficial Linux compatibility - a good start would be filling that out for all games that run under Linux.

Great, even better! I wasn't really aware of it, but I'll try to help out there then. I'll get on it this weekend, since I've got piss-all time during the next couple of days, and its too late to start today.

I wasn't aware of that either. So that's a template and for each game page (and per distro), we can add sections with a basic how to. If there are deeper instructions past the basic stuff like you need dosbox, suchandsuch dependency for that, etc, then you make a sub page (if my understanding of that section is correct).

As a beginning template, here's some stuff I came up for Arch Linux (which could be edited for other distros or made more generic to fit most distros):
====Arch====
 
=====Requirements=====
DOSBox
* Available from the 'community' Arch repository
* Current package version (as of 10/16/2012) is 0.74-3
* Install using 'pacman -S dosbox' or, if using non-root account, 'sudo pacman -S dosbox'
* Always make sure to check your desired game [http://www.dosbox.com DOSBox] for version compatibility.
 
=====Optional=====
WINE
* Can be utilized to install GOG executables from which you can then extract the files needed to use with DOSBox
* Available from the 'community' or 'multilib' (for 64-bit users) Arch repositories
* Current package version (as of 10/16/2012) is 1.5.14-2
* Install using 'pacman -S wine' or, if using non-root account, 'sudo pacman -S dosbox'
 
InnoExtract
* Can extract the files from an 'Inno Setup' executable, with which you can then extract the files needed to use with DOSBox
* Available from the Arch User Repository
* Current package version (as of 10/16/2012) is 1.3-1
* Install package by downloading the package from AUR and using 'pacman -U packagename' or by using an AUR utility such as 'packer' or 'yaourt'

So we could paste that into games as we purchase and test. Any scripts that help (for example, backing up save games - StarFlight comes to mind...) with that game can go in a sub-page.