If you still don't want to use my wrapper, that's OK, but I just wanted to make sure you knew that it does have a GUI. I forgot to mention that outside the instructions inside it.

(Basically, you install zenity via your package manager, download and unpack steamcmd and my wrapper into the same folder, maybe edit the one line which says where to put the downloaded games, mark the wrapper executable, and double-click it. It'll pop up a dialog where you can paste or type game IDs from SteamDB.)

Of cource it is OK. It is just can be not as efficient as asking directly in the thematical communities. I've given some useful (IMO) links so you should probably check them out (albeit I know some of the most active people there are present here as well). :-)
In this case you should probably just archive your home (Windows) directory and, probably, all other important work-related data and just re-install Windows completely. As an ex-windows user myself (XP was the last in my experience) I can tell you this method works the best: it is more productive than trying to glue crumbling registry, reinstall all missing or damaged redistributable libraries, sort out WinSxS DLL-hell dependencies etc.

I see no point in trying to download Windows games on Linux via "Steam for WIndows" 'cause they are hardly working anyways. You can check this out here. There is no escaping Windows re-inastllation and the sooner it will be done -- the better.
Then you should probably stay away from WINE (and PlayOnLinux) forever as it is an "Eternal Beta". To a lesser extent this can be said about Linux in general ^.^: something is always broken (e.g. nVidia Optimus), something (X sercer, SysV init) is always in the process of replacement with something unstable and an obvious beta (Wayland, systemd).

It does? Sweet. I'll try it out. Thank you, ssokolow.

I currently backed up my Windows desktop because I have to turn off my computer at night. It's over half of my major files anway, so the rest will be alright. Installing Windows will take time. I asked Adam about Mint before taking the plunge and I understand that Linux is eternal beta, but so far it's the type of beta I'm comfortable with. It said stable and to me right now, it's more stable than Windows. It's drivers are very plug and play, therefore my Wifi Card only works on Mint versus Windows where I tried a terrible number of drivers for it (it's an upgrade from my old Wifi Card).

Anyway, I'm just using Linux for games that would run under my native (Intel 3000) graphics card that comes with the CPU on my laptop. Playing on anything Nvidia is out of the question. I think Linux will be fine. I've tested out Wine with a couple games here and it seems that a lot of them will run. So, unless it breaks somehow, I think I'll be fine. Unless a lot of games start breaking. At least Wine stable will eventually be fixed but I know of a workaround that should take more time and tinkering but will get the same result.

Again, thank you for the help. I could move this or start a new thread in a more appropriate GOG forum should that be more, uh, appropriate.

No problem.

Feel free to poke me about the GUI.

Games where I need to download the ScummVM resources off Steam are so rare that I can't remember what TODOs I meant to note down. (eg. I forget whether I added the couple of lines of code to guarantee some form of progress indication under all circumstances.)

...which reminds me. In the long term, it'd be nice to generalize the UI I wrote for lgogd_uri and apply it as an easy-to-add frontend for various downloading tools that don't provide their own GUI. (youtube-dl, SteamCMD, lgogdownloader, wget, etc.)

For the reference, compiling Mesa with Ryzen 7 1700X is a breeze. All those 8 cores and 16 threads really help.

I wonder if GOG can tweak the installer to use parallelized decompression. That can speed up installation time depending on the CPU too.

You could... but given the state of GOG's notifications, it might be a long time before I notice.

If you don't mind giving a valid reply address (possibly via ), you'd get a faster response from [url=http://blog.ssokolow.com/contact/]the contact form on my blog since I often check my inbox multiple times per day.

Sounds good. I will go through your contact form then. Nice blog by the way.

I have a question about a small issue I have on Linux. Is there an easy way to make shortcuts for the menu? For instance, I have a shortcut on my desktop that starts up The Witcher (it's a .sh file, from adamhm's excellent script). But I'd also like to have it in the menu, under Games.

I've done a little research and can probably do it manually, in addition to the menu editor, but is there a fast way to do this, like copying the shortcut I already have somewhere? I hoped it was possible to just drag it to the menu, but it doesn't work.

You might have to tweak the contents of the .desktop file slightly to put it where you want it (I suspect the one on the desktop may not have a line containing Categories=Game;ActionGame;RolePlaying to put it into the right folder).

Once it's tweaked, you should just be able to copy it into /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.local/share/applications/ and then do whatever causes your specific desktop to re-scan those files. (On my desktop, just waiting a second or two and then opening the launcher menu will do it.)

For future reference:

1. The valid category tags are listed in the Registered Categories section of the XDG desktop menu spec

2. Everything else you see when you open up one of those .desktop files in a text editor is explained in the Recognized desktop entry keys section of the XDG Desktop Entry spec.

3. If you want to do something fancier (like installing a custom icon, creating a new submenu, or adding a new filetype association, look into the xdg-... commands (eg. xdg-desktop-menu, xdg-icon-resource, xdg-mime, etc.) from the xdg-utils package. (Here's the xdg-utils website with the online documentation.)

Thank you. That's an exceedingly thorough recipe for making a simple menu item, but then every possible option is described in detail. Sounds like there isn't an easy and quick way to do this then, like copying the existing shortcut, because the menu items require additional variables. Would be very neat if you could take a shortcut from the desktop and drag it into the relevant part of the menu, and Mint did the rest in the background. Maybe one day that will be possible.

Managed to do this for The Witcher, though. Had to remove some quotation marks I thought had to be there to get it working, and now it launches and looks right, so all is good.

However, I don't understand why for instance the old shortcut to Witcher 2 works. Before upgrading to 18.2 I had that disk mounted in /media and now it's in /mnt. Shortcut uses /media paths, and that directory is empty. Yet the shortcut works and the game launches. I find that pretty odd.

Theoretically, the only extra variable you need is Categories. If it works as a desktop shortcut, it should work if you drop it into ~/.local/share/applications.

Heck, it should even work if you omit Categories... you'll just have to open your menu editor and move it out of the Lost and Found folder.

That depends on what features were implemented in your desktop. I know I can drag desktop shortcuts into the tree view in KDE's menu editor utility.

(I haven't tried dragging them directly into the menu itself.)

That is odd. Maybe your desktop has some kind of internal remapping support where, when the old path is asked for, it's smart enough to look for the new one.

(Probably inspired by how, as far back as the Windows 98 SE on my retro-PC, if you move the target of a shortcut and then click the shortcut, it'll start searching the hard drive to find its new location.)

A hint for games that are using Unity 5.6 and newer. You can enable Vulkan renderer in them, even if it's not enabled by default, by passing -force-vulkan parameter to the game binary.

Do you have to do that by command-line or would you be able to do that by gui somehow? Also, how do you know when your game is giving you a hard time as a result of Vulkan being disabled?

You can either do it from the terminal, or modify the .desktop launcher for the game, or for example its start.sh script which GOG provides.

I suppose you'll notice some issues, if they are serious.