Only their Galaxy client, because any games with native linux support has the proper installer files. They don’t go out of their way to ensure windows only games also work on linux
The Linux version of X4 took over a week longer to update on GoG than Steam for the 7.00 update.
If it updates from local files, I usually use an open-source program, lgogdownloader, to download installers for GoG.
If it doesn’t…yeah, not much that can be done about that, if Egosoft uses their own updater on one platform and Steam on another.
I will say that actually, one of my single largest irritations about Steam is that it uses multiple TCP connections to download, and one cannot limit the number of TCP connections it uses when downloading. The result is that when it saturates your local connection, it tends to squeeze out other programs using the connection, since available bandwidth tends to wind up roughly allocated relative to the number of connections being used under congestion. I really wish that it wouldn’t do that.
I wouldn’t care if I could just say “use no more than 2 connections”, but…
Not a problem exclusive to linux. There are many games that don’t receive an update on gog after some time, or lack the linux build, or several other things.
They’ve always distributed Linux versions for games that have them an those are the ones which pop-up by default on the game’s downloads pages if you’re browsing their site from Linux, so it’s not as if they don’t support Linux.
What you mean is that they haven’t created their own Linux distro and Wine fork like Steam.
Meanwhile because they ship DRM-free games with offline installers they’re actually closer to the spirit of Linux than Steam: you have full control over how you run a game you got for them (for example, I try to run all games sandboxed with networking restricted to localhost only plus a number of other safety limitations, which I can do with GOG games launched from Lutris but not with Steam games).
As I see it Steam does a lot of handholding (both in Windows and Linux) in exchange for them retaining a ton of control over your gaming, whilst GOG just gives you maximum freedom but with zero handholding.
Maybe because I’ve been a Techie and Gamer since the 90s, personally I vastly prefer the later approach but I can see how people who grew up in the hand-holding era of computing would value convenience over control.
I didn’t even realize you could download them directly from their website. There’s no indication of this when visiting the website on Linux. I thought you had to use the client.
What you mean is that they haven’t created their own Linux distro and Wine fork like Steam.
You being able to play it on linux is not the same thing as having Linux support. They don’t even have a first-party launcher. Probably half the games I buy on GOG don’t even launch, even after adding them to Steam. Meanwhile Steam works literally 100% of the time, in my experience.
Try running the GOG games from Lutris instead of Steam (I also heard good things about Heroic Launcher, but haven’t tried it).
Obviously for GOG games Steam isn’t going to have the scripts that properly configure Proton and if you try and run the games directly with Wine yourself you get none of the modern conveniences in things like Steam, Lutris or the Heroic Launcher and have to actually learn the “old ways” of going through the log when game fails to launch, figure out the missing DLLs and which packages they’re in and adding those yourself to the Wine instance you’re using for that game with Winetricks.
GOG’s support for Linux starts and ends at distributing the Linux installers for games which have Linux versions, exposing a REST API to their service that lets any app integrate with it - which is how Lutris and Heroic Launcher can download the game installers directly from GOG - and making sure the games are DRM free (which in my experience makes it more likely that GOG games work under Linux than Steam games: I’ve had to actually download and run pirated versions of Steam games for them to actually work in Linux but never had that problem with GOG games).
Steam on the other hand will do pretty much everything for you, directly from their all-in-one storefront+launcher app, exposing very little of the inner workings to you, but the tradeoff is that you’re tied to their ecosystem and don’t tend to learn how to do things yourself.
if you try and run the games directly with Wine yourself you get none of the modern conveniences in things like Steam, Lutris or the Heroic Launcher and have to actually learn the “old ways” of going through the log when game fails to launch
They do not work in Lutris or Heroic either, as I said previously.
the tradeoff is that you’re tied to their ecosystem and don’t tend to learn how to do things yourself
All of Steam’s Proton stuff is open-source and GOG could easily implement them, but they make the decision not to every day.
I get it, Linux makes up like 3% of the gaming market, but its paramount to me personally, and while I appreciate GOG’s game preservation and other ethics, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. The fact that I have to “learn the old ways” is why I won’t buy from them. I do not want to “learn how to do things myself”, I just want to play the games I paid for and not be spied on and have ads relentlessly crammed down my throat. Sorry, not sorry. I have a job already.
They do not work in Lutris or Heroic either, as I said previously.
That was unclear from “Probably half the games I buy on GOG don’t even launch, even after adding them to Steam”. Frankly I thought you were trying to run GOG games the old fashioned way directly in Wine from the command line, since I haven’t really had your experience of half my games in GOG not running in Linux (of the ones I tried in my 200+ games library in GOG only a few did not just run fine directly when installed and launched via Lutris, and of those I still managed get maybe half to run, which is similar to my success rate with Steam games).
Frankly it’s very weird that you’ve tried them with Lutris and Heroic and have such a horrible success rate on GOG games specifically, since for me even pirated games yield a better “hands off” success rate than “half don’t even launch”.
You must be incredibly unlucky or the Steam Deck (assuming that’s what you use) is seriously fucked up in terms of general Wine compatibility.
All of Steam’s Proton stuff is open-source and GOG could easily implement them, but they make the decision not to every day.
Steam games come with phone-home DRM and are often heavily integrated with Steam’s server API for things like cloud saves, which ties them down even further to Steam’s infrastructure.
GOG going with the Steam APIs and Steam’s very own fork of Wine (which is what Proton is), the former designed to tie games down to Steam’s server infrastructure and the other to integrate best with Steam’s store app, makes no sense both from a business perspective and from a freedom in gaming perspective and “freedom in gaming” is GOG’s main schtik as a games store.
Steam’s contributions to Linux are to help Steam, not to help Linux, which is probably why they forked Wine into Proton rather than contributing into Wine: they have to keep it open source since Proton is based on the original LGPL code from Wine (they would need to rewrite it from scratch to close source it), but by controlling that fork they can make sure it will always work best inside the Steam app, in the Steam Deck and with Steam Games.
Steam’s Linux contributions are optimized to work best with Steam (and specific things like the Steam API only work with Steam infrastructure), which is what I meant when I said that they want to tie gamers to their infrastructure.
Let’s not be naive: Steam does what’s good for Steam and whilst as a side-effect they do contribute to Linux, it’s always in ways that are optimized to work best from the Steam app and with Steam games, whilst GOG does not contribute to Linux at all, just kinda supporting it with minimum effort, but since their “unique selling proposition” is freedom in gaming, de facto in Linux they get out of the way of open source gaming support tools and of gamers who want to more tightly control their gaming experience.
Both Steam and GOG are doing what’s best for them and both bring as a side effect different benefits for gaming in Linux.
I love this from GOG. I already liked them because of their game conservation efforts, but now I like them even more.
They support free games. If only they supported free platforms to play them on…
What does this mean?
It means they have zero Linux support.
Only their Galaxy client, because any games with native linux support has the proper installer files. They don’t go out of their way to ensure windows only games also work on linux
The Linux version of X4 took over a week longer to update on GoG than Steam for the 7.00 update.
If it updates from local files, I usually use an open-source program, lgogdownloader, to download installers for GoG.
If it doesn’t…yeah, not much that can be done about that, if Egosoft uses their own updater on one platform and Steam on another.
I will say that actually, one of my single largest irritations about Steam is that it uses multiple TCP connections to download, and one cannot limit the number of TCP connections it uses when downloading. The result is that when it saturates your local connection, it tends to squeeze out other programs using the connection, since available bandwidth tends to wind up roughly allocated relative to the number of connections being used under congestion. I really wish that it wouldn’t do that.
I wouldn’t care if I could just say “use no more than 2 connections”, but…
This seems like a developer/publisher issue. GoG can’t update with files it hasn’t been given.
Not a problem exclusive to linux. There are many games that don’t receive an update on gog after some time, or lack the linux build, or several other things.
They’ve always distributed Linux versions for games that have them an those are the ones which pop-up by default on the game’s downloads pages if you’re browsing their site from Linux, so it’s not as if they don’t support Linux.
What you mean is that they haven’t created their own Linux distro and Wine fork like Steam.
Meanwhile because they ship DRM-free games with offline installers they’re actually closer to the spirit of Linux than Steam: you have full control over how you run a game you got for them (for example, I try to run all games sandboxed with networking restricted to localhost only plus a number of other safety limitations, which I can do with GOG games launched from Lutris but not with Steam games).
As I see it Steam does a lot of handholding (both in Windows and Linux) in exchange for them retaining a ton of control over your gaming, whilst GOG just gives you maximum freedom but with zero handholding.
Maybe because I’ve been a Techie and Gamer since the 90s, personally I vastly prefer the later approach but I can see how people who grew up in the hand-holding era of computing would value convenience over control.
I didn’t even realize you could download them directly from their website. There’s no indication of this when visiting the website on Linux. I thought you had to use the client.
So yeah, I guess this
They literally say they support Ubuntu… https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212456929-General-questions?product=gog
Awesome! Is there a link to the GOG client for Ubuntu!?
Yeah yeah. Just saying it’s definitely more than the “zero support” you credit them for.
How is it different? In what way are they “supporting” Ubuntu?
Zero is a bit harsh, I bought some games with Linux launchers on GoG.
Yeah, its a little better than zero but it isn’t great.
Compared to Steam? Not even close.
Compared to EGS? Infinitely times more.
Not sure what this means, I’m playing mine on Linux just fine.
You being able to play it on linux is not the same thing as having Linux support. They don’t even have a first-party launcher. Probably half the games I buy on GOG don’t even launch, even after adding them to Steam. Meanwhile Steam works literally 100% of the time, in my experience.
Try running the GOG games from Lutris instead of Steam (I also heard good things about Heroic Launcher, but haven’t tried it).
Obviously for GOG games Steam isn’t going to have the scripts that properly configure Proton and if you try and run the games directly with Wine yourself you get none of the modern conveniences in things like Steam, Lutris or the Heroic Launcher and have to actually learn the “old ways” of going through the log when game fails to launch, figure out the missing DLLs and which packages they’re in and adding those yourself to the Wine instance you’re using for that game with Winetricks.
GOG’s support for Linux starts and ends at distributing the Linux installers for games which have Linux versions, exposing a REST API to their service that lets any app integrate with it - which is how Lutris and Heroic Launcher can download the game installers directly from GOG - and making sure the games are DRM free (which in my experience makes it more likely that GOG games work under Linux than Steam games: I’ve had to actually download and run pirated versions of Steam games for them to actually work in Linux but never had that problem with GOG games).
Steam on the other hand will do pretty much everything for you, directly from their all-in-one storefront+launcher app, exposing very little of the inner workings to you, but the tradeoff is that you’re tied to their ecosystem and don’t tend to learn how to do things yourself.
They do not work in Lutris or Heroic either, as I said previously.
All of Steam’s Proton stuff is open-source and GOG could easily implement them, but they make the decision not to every day.
I get it, Linux makes up like 3% of the gaming market, but its paramount to me personally, and while I appreciate GOG’s game preservation and other ethics, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. The fact that I have to “learn the old ways” is why I won’t buy from them. I do not want to “learn how to do things myself”, I just want to play the games I paid for and not be spied on and have ads relentlessly crammed down my throat. Sorry, not sorry. I have a job already.
That was unclear from “Probably half the games I buy on GOG don’t even launch, even after adding them to Steam”. Frankly I thought you were trying to run GOG games the old fashioned way directly in Wine from the command line, since I haven’t really had your experience of half my games in GOG not running in Linux (of the ones I tried in my 200+ games library in GOG only a few did not just run fine directly when installed and launched via Lutris, and of those I still managed get maybe half to run, which is similar to my success rate with Steam games).
Frankly it’s very weird that you’ve tried them with Lutris and Heroic and have such a horrible success rate on GOG games specifically, since for me even pirated games yield a better “hands off” success rate than “half don’t even launch”.
You must be incredibly unlucky or the Steam Deck (assuming that’s what you use) is seriously fucked up in terms of general Wine compatibility.
Steam games come with phone-home DRM and are often heavily integrated with Steam’s server API for things like cloud saves, which ties them down even further to Steam’s infrastructure.
GOG going with the Steam APIs and Steam’s very own fork of Wine (which is what Proton is), the former designed to tie games down to Steam’s server infrastructure and the other to integrate best with Steam’s store app, makes no sense both from a business perspective and from a freedom in gaming perspective and “freedom in gaming” is GOG’s main schtik as a games store.
Steam’s contributions to Linux are to help Steam, not to help Linux, which is probably why they forked Wine into Proton rather than contributing into Wine: they have to keep it open source since Proton is based on the original LGPL code from Wine (they would need to rewrite it from scratch to close source it), but by controlling that fork they can make sure it will always work best inside the Steam app, in the Steam Deck and with Steam Games.
Steam’s Linux contributions are optimized to work best with Steam (and specific things like the Steam API only work with Steam infrastructure), which is what I meant when I said that they want to tie gamers to their infrastructure.
Let’s not be naive: Steam does what’s good for Steam and whilst as a side-effect they do contribute to Linux, it’s always in ways that are optimized to work best from the Steam app and with Steam games, whilst GOG does not contribute to Linux at all, just kinda supporting it with minimum effort, but since their “unique selling proposition” is freedom in gaming, de facto in Linux they get out of the way of open source gaming support tools and of gamers who want to more tightly control their gaming experience.
Both Steam and GOG are doing what’s best for them and both bring as a side effect different benefits for gaming in Linux.
I think they’re saying GOG doesn’t support Linux?