Would it be that hard to play gog games like quake and the witcher 3 on linux? What wouod I need to do?

I believe GOG's Linux games are packed as tarballs, so just DL and install, I guess,

I think he was asking about playing non-Linux games on Linux (which I'm sooo not qualified to give any advice about).

Also, I'm pretty sure the Linux downloads haven't been available as tarballs since...last year some time, I think?

Yeah, I meant windows games. Moat new ones don't work right on windows anyway (mass effect), so why not disconnect from MS overpriced software and starve the beast?

It shouldn't be that difficult, not sure about TW3 GOG promised a native one, but that was many moons ago

I'll answer only for games you mentioned and some general info.

Quake has been ported to linux. There are many source port of quake available for free online. To play quake, you just need to install one of them, and then provide it with data files from your gog version of quake.

As for witcher 3, you are out of luck. There is an application on Linux called wine. This app allows us to run windows games on linux, but for now it's limited to directx9.as far as I know, witcher 3 doesn't have dx9 modr, so for now it's simply impossible to play it on linux

Hi, you can find the list of all games that are tested by gog users to run under wine here:

List 1: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_judas_does_this_run_in_wine_thread/post2
List 2: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_judas_does_this_run_in_wine_thread/post3

You can find more data in the same thread about Windows games install under Wine on Linux. Just ask there and people will help you out.

Also while Witcher 3 does not run on Linux you can play Witcher 2 that has linux port on gog. Also Witcher 1 has been tested under Wine and works nice.

If there's no native Linux port or the game doesn't run under DosBox or ScummVM, you'll need Wine, but that's not a guaranteed way to success, as it doesn't run everything perfectly or at all.

That depends on whether the game in question works properly in Linux using Wine (for Windows games) or DOSbox (for DOS games), or one of the commercial Wine alternatives. There is no simple yes or no answer, only "maybe" and it depends very much on what game you are talking about, what version of wine/dosbox/whatever you might be using, what hardware you have (CPU/RAM/GPU/etc.), what distribution you're using, what video drivers, how you have it all configured, what the phase of the moon is, and how many superdelegates have committed their pledge to vote for you, as well as how long it has been since you last sacrificed a goat.

For Windows games, visit winehq.org and look it up in the app database for tips on getting the given game to work, or if using a commercial emulator then visit their respective site/database for tips.

Either way, it is a game of maybes across the board with a billion variables. Best of luck though!

I've got Hell Yeah to run and it's a DX10 game, can't say if it'll work on any other DX10 game as I've yet to test it (and not sure what games in my steam library is dx10 only)

the witcher 3 need directx 11. Wine is compatible with directx 9 and some feature of directx 10 (only few games actually run).
there are some experiments :
https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/caron/2015/12/10/directx-11-really-james-didnt-lie

this is the last news for directx 11 on wine.

the problem is that wine should be used only if the developer is dead... we are now in 2016, a developer should always create any game at least for windows, mac and linux (all commercial game engine support cross-platform, Unreal Engine, Unity3d for example... there is no reason to not-support cross-platform).

they started win DX11 a few months ago. According to this most of DX10 is already useful: https://www.winehq.org/winapi_stats