Today, GOG officially announced Galaxy 2.0 and their aim seems to be to pull everyone together under one roof.
There are two things that matter to all of us gamers: the games we play and the friends we play them with. But as more titles come with dedicated launchers and clients, our games and gaming buddies become scattered in between them. With GOG GALAXY 2.0, you’ll be able to combine multiple libraries into one and connect with your friends across all gaming platforms!
It's like a much fancier version of Steam's own ability to add games installed from other sources, as Galaxy 2.0 will also support cross-launcher friends lists and chat making it sound pretty darn handy. They do also state you can "Connect more platforms and add new features with open-source integrations.". Those hoping that is some kind of olive branch being extended for Linux will likely be disappointed though, going by their FAQ on the newer dedicated Galaxy site it sounds more like it's simply for adding other services into the client itself for those GOG haven't yet done.
This would have been the perfect time to finally announce the ridiculously long-overdue Linux support for GOG Galaxy (especially with the Epic Store also not supporting Linux), sadly GOG are continuing to leave Linux out. In response to a user question on Twitter about Linux, the GOG team simply said "GOG GALAXY 2.0 will be available for Windows and Mac.". While an honest answer, it's also pretty blunt. No mention of it coming, just a whole lot of nothing.
It's worth noting the wishlist entry "Release the GOG Galaxy client for linux" on GOG's own website with over 21K votes, has been listed as "in progress" for a long time now (at least as far back as 2015 going by the Wayback Machine). You would think by now we would have had some sort of sign.
Considering even itch.io, a tiny little outfit has managed to support Linux really well with their open source client you would think after multiple years GOG would.
I've reached out to GOG, to see if they would like a chat about it. I will update if/when they reply.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Last edited by Appelsin on 23 May 2019 at 4:56 pm UTC
Quoting: ShmerlOur platform needs more games.If I can add to this, our platform also needs more gamers. :)
Mohandevir May 23, 2019
Quoting: dpanterQuoting: ShmerlOur platform needs more games.If I can add to this, our platform also needs more gamers. :)
...And to achieve that, Wine is not the solution. Lutris, may become a part of the solution, if it ever becomes fully automated like in: "Click install and play". Anyway, as long as there is no mainstream pre-installed Linux hardware (excluding developper stuff) sold on Gamestop (EBgames), bestbuy, walmart, amazon, newegg, DELL and the likes, Linux will remain a niche product treated like a 2nd grade citizen.
That's my only complaint about Valve; they didn't pushed as hard as they could have to make the Steam Machines a big deal. It served as a proof of concept. And, like it or not, it led us to Stadia.
Last edited by Mohandevir on 23 May 2019 at 5:31 pm UTC
There are also a few occasions where I'd be glad about incremental updates. I don't mind re-downloading a GB or two, but when games measure 40GB or more it gets tedious fast. For those I'd consider using Galaxy. But generally, I like the Linux offline installers better, and once a game has matured I like to keep the final version around on a local drive, just in case.
So all in all, no big surprise, and not a really big disappointment either.
If they don't listen on twitter or forums, maybe we can get them numbers if we come together and sign up.
Then when the BETA is ready and if they still don't support Linux, they will get a lot of numbers from all of us who can't participate.
https://www.gogalaxy.com/
slaapliedje May 23, 2019
Quoting: TheSHEEEPGOG installers are ridiculously slow, though, always have been. I do not know what they do with these files other than unpacking them, but every GOG installation just takes ages
For Linux installers, they are using Mojosetup, and it's using simple zip as far as I know for compression. Decompression should be possible to do in parallel using all cores, but no idea why they aren't doing that. For Windows installers they are using innosetup. Not sure if it supports parallelization. Nothing stops them from leveraging high LZMA grade compression with chunking and indexing, like pixz is doing.
Last edited by Shmerl on 26 May 2019 at 3:31 am UTC
Quoting: liamdaweToday, GOG officially announced Galaxy 2.0 and their aim seems to be to pull everyone together under one roof."Everyone" :D
Wake me up when Galaxy for Linux is a thing. I stopped buying games from GOG a while ago. At least they're not as hostile as Epic, that's why I'm not going to boycott them completely. But I'm slightly pissed by their moves, though.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me