sed does substitutions in text files. For example, "sed s/him/her/" (without the quotes) replaces every instance of "him" in standard input with "her". Essentially it's the command line version of find/replace. In any case, sed is relatively simple.

awk is actually a programming language that is used to process text files. Essentially, you write some code that processes one line, and awk automatically runs it on every line in the input file. Unlike sed, awk is actually quite complex, and I think many users might prefer perl or Python for this sort of thing.

Sometimes I've noticed that GOG games does not run from their script, but if you manually run the executable, it runs fine. To run it in this way, use
cd "~/GOG Games/<game name>/game"
to change into the game directory, then you can run the game's executable by simply using
./gamename
assuming the executable is called “gamename”.

Furthermore, since you are on ubuntu, if you have navigated to some folder in the graphical file manager, you can right-click on a folder (or on the background) and select “Open in Terminal”, which will open a terminal which has automatically navigated to that folder (saves you from using cd).

Another trick is that instead of using “chmod +x something.sh; ./something.sh”, you can merely use
bash something.sh
which will run the file, which is nice for one-offs such as running installers.

I've tried this with several games and I keep getting the same message. It appears I need to download some files, but unsure which ones and where

while loading shared libraries: libopenal.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

From what I've read on the internet this is an issue with running 32bit in 64 bit linux...though (For example with Baldurs Gate) I ran the BaldursGate64 as well in my attempt to get it to work. I think there are some libraries i need to download (not sure how to install them yet).


I am wondering if I get Wine if that makes it easier to use these games in play...though regarding Wine...

I've read up on Lutris and unsure which is better, Wine or Lutris for GOG games...

Right, you are probably missing some libraries. Just run
sudo apt install libopenal1 libopenal1:i386
and you should be set. To install wine, you probably want to run the newest development version, as that runs the most programs. To install it, use:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
wget -O - https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/winehq.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ bionic main'
wget -O- https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Emulators:/Wine:/Debian/Debian_10/Release.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt update
sudo apt install --install-recommends winehq-devel

This downloads the signing key (used to prevent both accidental and malicious corruption of packages), sets up wine's repositories (and dependencies), and finally installs wine. After this, you can just double-click any Windows executable, and they (ideally) run as on Windows.

If you want to play graphically intensive games, then you can set up DXVK, but this requires that you update your graphics driver first, and not knowing your particular hardware I can't really give any instructions for that.

These kind of threads show why Linux is so hard to get in to.

Not because it's a complicated system, but the whole smug and unfriendly aura surrounding it.

Say what you want about Microsoft and Windows having holes the size of the moons craters. They put in ALLOT of work in the user interface to make it easy to get in so that even your grandma get get a hold of it.

Hehe, was just thinking the same. I just download files, install and play. Nothing wrong with command line of course, started off even before dos, and use it a lot at work. But to play a game, what a total faff. It’s like being back in the days of setting up emm386 and drivers and stuff just to get the demo of command and conquer to work.

Honestly, I actually find the command line easier.

In this case (and assuming you use the offline installer):
* With GUI, download file, use the mouse to find the Downloads folder, then the .exe file, double click it, and hope it works; depending on the current load on the system, it may take a few seconds to get feedback..
* With the command line, cd to the Downloads folder, start typing the file name, press tab to complete it, then press enter; you get immediate feedback.

I would agree for windows 7 but 10 is not user friendly due to complex and inconsistent ui, harder to find things because of ads,apps in the way,etc

In this case it is more about the "Linux versions" of games actually being Windows versions running on WINE, which does complicate things. It is a bit of apples to oranges comparison to compare how to run a native Windows game on Windows, or that same Windows game in Linux WINE. If I compare e.g. how I install and run Steam + Team Fortress 2 on both Windows and Linux... it isn't any more complicated in Linux, the same experience as in Windows.

Also, the reason you see most of Linux instructions being in command line is because then you can give precise instructions, as in "write this command, then this, then this", instead of "go click icon X then select tab G and from there scroll down and find the button Y, behind which you find R". Naturally in Linux these kind of GUI instructions are even more complicated as there are several different windowing systems.

Generally I would agree MS hones the user interfaces, but in case of Windows 8-10, the Windows user interface has some kind split-brain schizophrenia where it doesn't always know what kind of user interface it wants to show to the user, and which one the user should use. Do you do something in the "old" Control Panel or the newer UI?

But I guess eventually MS wants to get rid of the "legacy" Win32 side of Windows 10, which will streamline the user interface and make it once again more coherent. For reference, you can check how Windows RT, Windows 10S and Windows 10X look like.

Then again, at that point you won't be able to run your GOG or Steam games on Windows anymore. so, yeah...

Yeah, this guy said the same as me in two lines...

why do you think MS wants to get rid of win32?

I think Sweeney explained it already four years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/04/microsoft-monopolise-pc-games-development-epic-games-gears-of-war?CMP=share_btn_tw

and also Valve gave similar remarks. Also, Windows RT and Windows 10S were clear signs of where MS wished "PC" to go. Plus, Microsoft has quite often referred to Win32 applications as "legacy applications".

However, MS also keeps changing its near-future plans continuously, as there seems to be resistance to keep Win32 alive:

https://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2020/05/14/microsoft-will-detail-how-it-plans-to-unify-uwp-and-win32-apps-at-build-2020/

Well, there is a manual; it's what you access via the "man" command (and back in ancient times, you could get paper copies of UNIX manuals, I believe).

Unfortunately, most man pages aren't good with giving examples; they are, however, good as a reference, if you don't remember the syntax of an option, or if you are looking for an option that does something specific (like if you want to have ls sort files by size, but don't remember how). (One tip: When viewing a man page, you can press forward slash ('/') to search.)

Also, this feature doesn't help with GUI programs, and doesn't help people get to the point where they know about the "man" command in the first place.

It is an issue, but on the other hand, it does make it easier to give instructions to clueless users; it's easier to blindly enter a series of commands (or cut/paste from the browser, but thanks to browser-side JavaScript, that isn't a good idea) than it is to tell a user what to click and where to move the mouse.

One other nice thing is that, once a command is given, an experienced user can explain it to new users.

Anyway, I will attempt to explain what these commands do:

wget: This program retrieves a file from the internet, as specified on the URL. The -O option is used to specify the file to output, and the following dash ("-") indicates that the output should be passed to standard output. If we were to remove the pipe ("|") and everything past it, this command would simply download that file and display it in the terminal. (Another program that can do a similar job is "curl".

sudo: This command is used to get elevated privileges, allowing you to do things like install software system-wide, look at the file containing user password hashes, and wipe your hard drive. In any case, only use this if you know what you're doing, and with dangerous commands, you might want to type the rest of the command before you go back and add the "sudo". Note that you may be asked for your user password here.

apt-key: This is used to add a key to the list used by apt, at least when followed by "apt". The "-" means to read the key from standard input; if ran standalone, it would be reading from the keyboard. Essentially, by running this command, you are trusting WineHQ to not install malicious software; if you don't do this, you will get an error if you try to install from their repository.

The pipe character ("|"; on US keyboards it's usually the key right above Enter, but you need to be holding Shift to type it) means to take the standard output of one command ("wget" in this case) and send it to the standard input of the next ("sudo", which in turn passes the standard input on to "apt-key").

(Posting now so I don't lose what I've already typed.)

Oops: Forgot the first line (though it doesn't actually need to be the first step, as it turns out.)
dpkg --add-architecture: dpkg is the low level tool for installing packages; you usually don't need to use it directly. (apt will usually run this for you.) The --add-architecture option is used to tell apt to look at the repositories for another architecture; in this case, i386 means that 32-bit x86 software and libraries can now be installed (and Debian's multiarch support allows this to work seamlessly, provided the system is capable of executing such binaries).

Continuing on:
apt-add-repository: This command (which exists in Ubuntu but not Debian) is used to add a third-party repository to the system. In other words, this command will let you simply use apt to install software from that repository, subject to key verification (which the "apt-key add" instruction takes care of).

(Don't know why that second wget | sudo apt-key is needed here.)

apt update: This command tells apt to update its list of packages that are available to install. In this case, it will fetch the lists for the core repositories, as well as the i386 architecture's lists, and the list from the WineHQ repository you added.

apt install: This installs the package on your system, as well as its dependencies. It will, by default, install the "Recommends" package; I believe the "--install-recommends" option is not necessary here; if you really don't want them, you can negate it with "--no-install-recommends", but according to the debian policy, section 7.2, "The Recommends field should list packages that would be found together with this one in all but unusual installations.", so you're going to want those packages installed. If you want, you can add "--install-suggests" to install packages the maintainer thinks would be useful with the packages you have chosen to install; in this case, it might include something like "winetricks".

Anyway, feel free to critique my attempt at explaining these commands. (It might help to note whether you are a beginner or an experienced user; critiques from beginners are particularly welcome, as an experienced user might just assume things that a beginner might have no clue about.)