This forum post is created to summarize community achievements in terms of bringing more GOG Galaxy features over to Linux.
Even though I'm the person responsible for GOG in Heroic, the post is not biased and as impartial as possible.

Common terms used

Online features Galaxy features like achievements, abillity to play online, display leaderboards etc...
Offline installers also known as backup installers available for download from GOG website

Games launchers situation

All launchers listed here allow users to play Linux native as well as Windows native games (thanks WINE).

1. Lutris is without the doubt the most iconic game manager on Linux. Supports multiple stores. Lutris power starts with community arround it, specifically game install scripts that automatically apply necessary fixes and configuration. For GOG games it also allows to download games directly from GOG, leaving configuration part for the user. Games are downloaded thanks to offline installers, those are unpacked using tools like innoextract. At time being GOG games ran through Lutris run "offline" meaning no online features are available. There is no Cloud Storage support either.

2. Minigalaxy is a simple GOG launcher relying on offline installers simillar to Lutris. At time being games are run with no online features. Cloud Storage is not supported

3. Heroic Games Launcher is a open source GOG and Epic Games launcher. Unlike Lutris and Minigalaxy that are GTK apps, heroic is a Electron app. Heroic takes downloading of the games to the next level. MacOS and Windows titles are downloaded using same API's used by GOG Galaxy. Currently Linux native titles are only obtainable from offline installer so this is what is being used for them. At time being games are run with no online features (although that's almost done, see links below). There is Cloud Storage support.


Links for learning more

github.com/imLinguin/comet Work in progress implementation for online features (aimed to be launcher agnostic)

github.com/Lariaa/GameLauncherResearch/wiki documentation for downloading games, cloud storage and more.

Currently I don't see an added value. Using Electron is hardly something to brag about. I don't see it as a plus but a minus. Using GOG's web API vs a more standard download doesn't really matter. You get the game either way.

But if you can get Achievements working in Linux that would be something we don't currently have and I would value that.

Electron is issue for some and for others it doesn't matter. In Heroic case we observe lower memory usage than official launchers nevertheless, so I guess it's the matter of how the implementation is executed in the end.
The way of downloads matter when you are low on storage space, I know it's an edge case but it's worth mentioning. It also allows patching big files without need to redownload whole thing, I feel that's a huge gap. That's something games need to add on their end too. Currently only Stardew Valley has it, the dev somehow managed to compile it naticely for Linux

That's true, however we don't have such features for Linux native titles. In ideal world GOG should provide content system API with Linux builds.

Other advantage of content system over offline installers are version rollback and branching support, even though that's not something everyone uses it's still a feature that matters.

This already is a thing. At least on my Steam Deck I'm able to use Galaxy with a common prefix folder for my games. This isn't ideal for MANY reasons (among which is getting DOSBOX versions of games to work is very difficult). Unfortunately, I haven't worked out a viable solution for games needing different WINE or PROTON versions to work properly, either. The only solution I've found is to have multiple Galaxy installations, which is a non-starter for me.

The last time (maybe 6 months ago) I tried I did not have luck running Galaxy using only WINE. I was able to get it to kind of work with Bottles but galaxy seemed to run pretty flaky.

I've been able to do it on Arch Linux through Lutris with GE Proton 7. I don't know if Steam needs to be installed to use PROTON, but I installed PROTON with PROTONUPqt.

OK, that is probably another route. I just prefer to use only WINE if I can.

It's not recommended to use Proton outside Steam runtime. Instead there are Wine builds with Proton patches from a guy who develops Proton-GE (GloriousEggroll).

https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/wine-ge-custom

Easiest way to use them without building is through Lutris.

Thank you for your work on nile imLinguin! It does work as intended. I just had problems installing depencies on my distro, but this has nothing to do with nile in itself, but my repo, it seems.

In anyway, I finally could use Linux to download and backup anything related to Amazon. Thank you very much.

(I know this might not be the thread for this, but I'd like to quote you directly to thank you for it anyways.)

Haha, I'm glad to hear that. In terms of dependencies, checkout the README (I updated it after pip weirdness). If your distro isn't covered create a GitHub issue, we'll figure it out :)

You are doing amazing work, thank you so much and please keep it up! :)

You've somehow managed to do better than a whole company with profits in the millions, that says this is not feasible and too costly. And you did it for free, without any support, in your spare time.

For me, Heroic has two advantages compared to other tools:

1. Cloud saves
This is a life-saver when gaming on multiple devices, such as a desktop and then taking a laptop home to visit your parents or family.

2. Galaxy installs
These are much quicker and also a bit smaller in size than the whole process of offline installers. I never understood the offline installers' cumbersome implementation, that is antiquated. We also get the option of automatic updates, which is huge. Here it should be mentioned that Sude's lgogdownloader also does Galaxy installs, optionally, but I'm not sure about cloud saves currently (?). The beautiful GUI of Heroic won me over though.

There are many other cool features which I don't mention due to some of them also available in Lutris, such as very convenient Wine bottle management, and ease of getting custom Wine tools to run games, with all the bells and whistles and enough settings to confuse you with. Then you have no idea what you're talking about.

You don't have to value the same things I do. But I'm confident I know what is of value to me and what is not.

i'm using Heroic Game Launcher for a while now for GOG and Epic, it's almost like a native launcher, i hope they will add more launcher