GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects | Hacker News Reader

GOG Joins European Federation of Game Archives, Museums & Preservation Projects

gamingonlinux.com

246 pointsLorenDB38 comments

Just a high level comment on GOG, I am immensely grateful to them for existing and for sticking so strong to their principles against DRM, and for maintaining great customer service. I have bought a lot of games from GOG and have been very happy. As an exclusively Linux user, I also appreciate how well GOG works with Lutris et al and that they aren't making life harder for those devs. I love the offline installers and I deeply appreciate their availability.

I'm not a big gamer but after watching the industry and Linux/open source in general for many, many years, I'm more convinced than ever that it's the gaming community who will save general purpose computing (that's also a nod to Valve for everything they've done for Linux as well, which has been major).

Unfortunately, it is (very) hard to make non-native games from GOG work on Linux, as someone who just doesn't "grok" Wine. This is especially painful for me, because I have supported and want to support GOG, but my obscure point and click adventure games work out of the box with Proton on Steam, which is more than I can say about GOG games.

To this day, I have exactly one game that I have not managed to get working on my linux system: GRIS, bought from GOG. I tried everything suggested online, nothing worked. Since then (I still have not played GRIS), I tend to get stuff from Steam.

I usually just go Lutris -> install windows game from exe -> done & working.

Lutris handles the wine config for me, works 99% of the time.

Seconded. There are some games that still won't work, but for the most part they do.

GoG games work just fine when installed with Heroic in Linux.

Demanding that a small shop fighting DRM now also funds support for your rare operating system is some massive entitlement, especially since there's plenty of ways to make them work now.

Nobody is demanding anything. They simply stated what they value as a consumer, and if GOG wants more of their business, what they need to do to earn it. This is valuable feedback to any company.

What distro?

Have you spun up a SteamOS VM?

I spun up a few Linux VMs, tryin to get wineing... some would not even boot. ( ubuntu server ). Had a suggestion to try... Zoltan. Hmm... Installed perfectly. Ran dx9 installer next. Not even a hint of problems... Ran dxdiag like it was windows XP. ok... on to Dungeon Siege 1. Full on ran first try. Ran every GOG game I had. So.. if you need windows/wine compatibility... spin up a Zoltan Linux VM.

I've not heard of Zoltan Linux before, and am not finding it. Could you provide a link to it?

Same. The only thing I can find is the Zoltan load-balancer at Sandia Labs.

Do you mean Zorin?

I second that. I normally buy games on Gog when I have the option.

One would think GOG would participate in helping to spread the word about this game preservation petition in EU:

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home

They could put a permanent banner on their website, I'm sure that would bring in some signatures.

I never heard about this petition... Signed and shared to European friends!

I wish I liked GOG, but they ignore Linux users, while Steam's Linux support is the best thing that's happened to Linux gaming.

What do you mean by they ignore Linux users?

Every game clearly indicates whether it provides a Linux installer so there aren't any surprises there, and even in the cart you'll get a banner message saying something like, "Some of these games don't work on your operating system (Linux)" to avoid surprises.

You can even search the store filtering only for games that provide a Linux installer, which is a control I use regularly. It's disappointing how few games do offer that, but it's getting better everyday (for which I largely credit and thank Valve).

They don't support Linux with GOG Galaxy, but given they maintain compatibility with Lutris and Heroic and others I think I actually prefer that to official GOG Galaxy Support.

>They don't support Linux with GOG Galaxy

This is a bit of an issue.

For example, Dead Cells offers daily challenges and has a few items locked behind completing them. They facilitate these by using the platform's tooling, which means the GOG version uses Galaxy and Linux users can't access it. And as far as I can tell, there's nothing on the site telling you this, troubleshooting the problem took a fair amount of digging.

A small thing, and I still opt for GOG over anything else, but it can be annoying.

Another aspect to this, for recent games I imagine on a certain level it's on the original developer to implement things for their games sold through the GOG channel. There is a spreadsheet [1] of games where the GOG version has lesser functionality or has been left behind compared to others, usually steam.

This is one of my problems with the "PC gaming = steam" attitude that has become prevalent, PC as a platform is broad and varied, and if you're going to sell your product on multiple stores without making clear that they're different then you really should support them, otherwise be honest enough to only sell where you are prepared to. I'd say managing expectations and who's responsible only gets muddier when you're involving compatibility across different windows versions, hardware generations, or different OSes entirely.

[1] - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zjwUN1mtJdCkgtTDRB2I...

Two things, Heroic implements a GOG Galaxy api [1], and second, the challenges work on Windows without Galaxy, the problem is that their build of SDL is not up to date [2]

1: https://github.com/imLinguin/comet 2: https://www.gog.com/forum/dead_cells/daily_challenges_on_lin...

It's probably outside their scope, and they are not as large and wealthy as Valve that they can afford to invest the necessary resources. But you can use 3rd party launchers like "Heroic" that support GOG and basically give you the same experience as Steam does.

FWIW they could piggyback on Valve's open source work and help there like Zoom Platform (DRM-free shop like GOG, unrelated to Zoom) did[0]. ZP is a much smaller company than GOG (pretty much everyone in it, including the CEO, hangs out on their official Discord) and they still got someone to handle that part. I don't use the utility myself but i've seen on Discord that they -try to- provide support for people using it.

[0] https://zoom-platform.sh/

I find that this is also the easiest way to get your games loaded into the SteamOS interface.

On my homemade NixOS SteamOS-like gaming box, I have it boot into the SteamOS interface, and it's pretty and console-like, and it's nice to be able to quickly install my GOG and Epic games and automatically add it to Steam so it can be easily played with that interface.

Not a perfect solution, but you could just use Steam to load games from GOG on Linux though. Thereby getting "the best of both worlds". I have yet to stumble upon any major issue doing this.

Also, running other store launchers under Steam Proton works surprisingly well. I've been able to install Battle.net as a custom entry in Steam and run StarCraft II flawlessly in Linux.

There is a gog galaxy Linux replacement called MiniGalaxy

What does Steam bring to the table here?

You get to launch Windows games through Steam Proton. It's a no-hassle way to get up and running with gaming on Linux, although many are probably using Wine or Lutrix.

As a SteamDeack owner, I'm really looking forward to see AAA games be Linux-first.

Windows gaming really needs to stop.

I was thinking that way in the past. But then, the only stable ABI is the win32 one.

The linux kernel one is very stable, but the libs ones isn't.

As soon as the dev ensure and cooperates with wine/proton to make it work nicely, i'm game.

Needing those old libs in linux is rather cumbersome, if at all possible. So having wine doing the translation layer is a really good thing. As it frees the devs to be able to focus on 1 plateform.

I also noted that the switch enabled a lot of linux native ports. That's also a nice side effect.

> the only stable ABI is the win32 one

TBF, that's also true when compared to Windows. The only actually stable ABI in all major OS's are Linux Win32 via Wine.

You can create portable apps on Linux that will work for years to come. Bundle everything except for very core libraries, even libstd++. Things to NOT bundle would be glibc and any opengl implementation. To make apps backwards compatible with older versions of Linux, compile the app on a system with the oldest glibc you wish to support (because glibc is forwards compatible, but not backwards compatible).

This never really works in practice, far too many variations and compilation differences between distros. The Linux Standard Base was an attempt to do this and it went.... no where.

> (because glibc is forwards compatible, but not backwards compatible).

I've lost count of times I've had "portable" binaries not work because I'm using a newer version of glibc and the binary was compiled for Ubuntu/Debian.

The only "standardised" way of making native Linux apps portable and "work for life" is to use the thing that worked in the server space, containers, Flatpak being the vendor-neutral and more widely supported for desktop apps.

Is this something that Flatpak could fix?

Steam can already use bwrap (Flatpaks sandbox system) with its own runtime to accomplish this, but why bother when you can just target Win32 and have it work out the box.

Outside of graphic and input, game engines make use of very few native APIs compared to applications as they're made to be portable with consoles.

Proton has gotten so good now that this is less of an issue to me. I buy games on GOG and just load them into Steam with Heroic.

I actually will often get better performance doing it this way; Jupiter Hell, for example, has a native Linux port, but I almost exclusively play the Windows version on Linux. I'm not entirely sure why this is, maybe performance issues with OpenGL compared to the D3D->Vulkan pipeline.

Linux has so much fragmentation between distros and the like, the Windows API is ironically one of the easiest ways to get stuff working consistently on Linux. If you're playing games on NixOS, for example, you have to do extra work to get Linux versions working a lot of the time because NixOS kind of breaks dynamic-linking by default. If you play the windows versions on NixOS, it's often as easy as `wine myGame.exe`.

Your Steam Deck provides Windows API emulation so games coded to target Windows will run on it. As a Steam Deck owner, you are perpetuating Windows gaming.

Now if only GOG could fix their Mac client so that you can actually quit it.

Maybe someone at GOG will actually read this and let a project manager to let a programmer know to fix this. Because they keep doing everything else other than fixing a really really annoying bug. We shouldn't have to force-quit apps!

https://www.gog.com/forum/general_beta_gog_galaxy_2.0/macos_...

Valve should step up and do the right thing here.

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