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 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.
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?
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.
Gog funds Heroic.
By some other means than affiliate link payouts? Can you link some details about the arrangement?
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.
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
heroic has no download throttling, very annoying for shared/shitty networks and large games
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.
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.
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.There are also GUI launchers that can download from GOG:
We got Minigalaxy
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.
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.
If third party launchers were as good as the first party ones, we wouldn’t.
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.
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).
I 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.
