MarkoH01: As I told before: there is no reason for the bug tracker to even have a drop down field for XP if they'll never look into a reported bug IF the user is using XP because they don't officially support it.
Sure there is. Letting someone indicate their OS properly lets GOG developers know crucial information that is important on all bug reports for anything. Whether the OS is supported officially or not is an orthagonal issue. Eliminating XP from the list of choices does not stop anyone from using Galaxy, nor from reporting bugs in Mantis either. They'll go into Mantis, not find XP and then just randomly choose one of the other options that are there such as Windows 7 because the option they're looking for is not there, they may or may not comment inside the bug report that they did this and GOG could end up trying to diagnose a bug/problem on Windows 7 that is exclusively a bug on Windows XP, but because they didn't leave the person the option to report their OS properly, they get a bug report that contains useless misinformation and wastes developer time.
Being a developer myself, I too would have Windows XP and every other operating system listed in my bug tracker that someone might attempt to run my software on regardless of whether I actually support that OS or not because that is valuable information to a developer either way regardless of what random users think about it that aren't actually part of the development team.
I've actually been in a very similar situation as a developer before too. It wasn't an unsupported OS in the particular case I'm thinking of but rather an unsupported hardware platform. At the time we officially supported our product on a real operating system running on bare metal
physical computers, but we did not officially support the product on virtual machines. Nonetheless even though we did not support the product on virtual machines, the product did not purposefully do anything to prevent anyone from attempting to install and use it on one and there was no good reason to try to forcibly prevent people from doing it either. Even though we did not support it, we were flexible and would occasionally include a bug fix or add a device driver that made the customer experience better in virtual machines. But we made one thing absolutely crystal clear - that it was not officially supported but provided on an as-is basis - if it works great, if it breaks the customer gets to keep both pieces.
Someone requested the addition of virtual video and input device drivers at one point just for convenience and since it was unsupported it wasn't a priority. Eventually I had some spare time and investigated it and added the software on my own personal time just to be a nice guy and add some convenience for people who used virtual machines. Some people were quite happy about that added convenience even for an unsupported setup.
Over the next 6-12 months I received various bug reports for those unsupported drivers and let people know that they were provided as-is for convenience but otherwise unsupported, but that they could contact the virtual machine vendor for technical support if desired. After receiving a few reports from customers that were absolutely livid and demanded that "you ship it, you support it" and made a massive big deal about it, I decided to agree with them. So, I immediately yanked all of the unsupported drivers out of the next build and an update went out a week or so later that officially removed those drivers from the OS completely. Now there was no question or confusion whatsoever to people about what was supported and what was not supported. They didn't seem to like that solution apparently, but that solution solved the problem amazing. Future bug reports and feature requests took so much less time, it was CLOSED->UNSUPPORTED. Easy peasy!
One year or so later the virtual machine software provider in question made a business partnership deal with us and as a part of that deal they wanted us to officially support their product. It was mutually beneficial, and in this particular case a condition of that was that bug reports about the VM related drivers etc. would be reassigned to *their* engineers (hey, we didn't have their source code, but they had ours...). Drivers got added back, and bug reports redirected to the VM company, who despite claims they'd take care of them just more or less ignored bug reports and they sat their and rotted, thankfully without any notifications going to me. :)
The lessons I learned as a developer from that and about 50 other similar situations or more over time... if I were in charge of XP support at GOG, I'd remove the ability to install the software on XP, and remove the ability to even run the executables on XP even if someone copied them manually from a supported OS over to XP by detecting the OS it is running on and bailing with a "Unsupported operating system." error... but that's just thick skinned me.
GOG on the other hand is a big fluffy softie full of rainbow farting unicorns! :)
MarkoH01: As I said above, I'll change to Win7 completely since my new PC I ordered a few days ago won't support XP anymore anyhow, so I might give Galaxy another chance if it's running MUCH better than it does now. However I will not file a support ticket again. If they care they have all the informations about the bug in my old report and now here in the thread. If they don't care then sometime soon they will receive a bug report by another user because the bug is reproducable and occurs every time. I for myself have just deleted the double entry out of the registry and can live with it. I like to help but if somebody don't want my help then there's no need for me to pursue this any further.
If I might put forth one piece of (hopefully useful) advice that you might or might not have considered yet (coming from XP), but hopefully will save you from a future headache that will happen either now or sometime in the near future, it would be that I highly recommend using a 64bit version of Windows if you have hardware capable of running it. Not for Galaxy, but rather a lot of newer games in the last few years and a large number of brand new releases coming out are 64bit-only, and even some regular desktop software is starting to go that way as well. I've got a few friends using Windows 7 32bit that curse and swear in my ear weekly when I mention some cool new game and they go check it out and find out it is 64-bit only. Their reactions are almost identical to people angry about losing Windows XP support for something, etc. :)
Now that you've made the decision to switch though, even if you're still upset about it - believe me things get better and you'll probably end up being happy with the end results and glad you made the change. I resisted for a LONG time myself and most others I know did too. I think it was good to wait it out for a while, but once I made the change it took a week to adapt and I didn't look back. I hope you have the same good experience too! :)
BKGaming: Just updated, now trying to update Saints Row 3 results in a server problem error.
Also can someone explain why the hell it's recent update appears to be over 200 MB in Galaxy and 1 MB on the site... the entire point of Galaxy is to save time and bandwidth. That's ridiculous if that is correct.
Mine did a fast 2MB or so update followed by about 50MB update going from beta1 to beta2 this morning which is pretty reasonable. I suspect it could be anywhere up to 100MB or more though, but over time the updates are likely to be smaller presumably due to deltas and possibly on-the-wire compression if they're not already doing that. I've got 25Mbps Internet so 500MB updates will install faster than I can blow my nose and fart or care about it though. I imagine if someone is trying to use Galaxy from within North Korea or the ISS or the back of a pickup truck on a country road or something it might suck to have to wait 90 seconds instead of 60 or whatever though...
*RUNS* :oP
