Well, couldn't they say in some disclaimer, that the Linux ports won't get any technical support here and just make them downloadable finally? Create some link with "for technical problems with this port, contact the author with this button".

BTW: "Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2" has a Linux port too
(I know, that it's not even available here for Windows, but It is a good old game ;)

and it took Valve 3 years to add Linux support, code for the Linux client was found in the OSX client in 2010 so work on Linux either started or being considered then..actually you know what forget it because there is obviously no point in having this discussion with you because you are not going to even bother with a proper counter arguement and instead just keep going with Strawman arguments and retorts.

Competition forces one to keep up, or to lose. I'd say one year is more than enough to produce a design for long term support solution. Then it can take time to implement it. From the way things look now, GOG couldn't even come up with a design during the last year. That's a failure (in solving this issue), not a business as usual like you are trying to claim.

While I agree, they should do some form of linux support (damn, catch the buzz, gog!), I can understand their defensive position.
"External support or no support" fit's also not well to gog's self interpretation and for what gog is paid for, providing actually good support for the titles. I think they see this aspect as one core separator from their competitors. Also, someone could start haggle for reduced prices on linux variants... ;)

Sadly, I cannot agree.
Some of the Dosbox releases here had a superior Windows version.
I still have got Dungeon Keeper Gold on CD with shiny D3D-support (and therefore anti aliasing and anisotropic filters too) and it runs well on my WinXP-Partition.
Instead of making the Win95-port compatible to 7 and 8 and cracking it, they just sold the ugliest version in Dosbox
while I thought, that they use the most up to date versions and give support for them. It's another item I regret having bought here.

Adding the existing widescreen-hacks would be good support too, but instead, it's all up to the community again.

BTW: Using the existing game engine recreations for some games by default would be grand too (of course they would need to talk to the authors beforehand).

But yes, Linux support would be grand, although most of us would already be happy, if they are not forgotten or ignored entirely... Just putting the existing ports on here as a "bonus content" or something like that sure wouldn't hurt.

I understand GOG's reasoning, and I appreciate everything they've done for PC gaming in the past five years, but because of this, Humble Store is going to be my primary outlet from here on out. I run Lubuntu on a slower laptop, and this is a prime environment for the types of games GOG offers.

And gaming in general just needs to move on to more open platforms. Microsoft is not being fair with the manner in which they update DirectX, making exclusive versions on newer OS's when they could port them older ones, forcing all of us to shell out another $150 to upgrade. Valve gets this and is going all in on linux.

My hope is that GOG joins in the noble effort, even if it means explicitly offering no support for Linux users. Why can't they just make the Linux version harder to download, like put a 6-point font link in the bottom right of the game page, just to make sure people know what they're getting themselves into with a Linux port.

That's rather unfair, don't you think? Do you have any idea how long MS sits on known security flaws even after they've been patched? Here's a hint, it's longer than you'd think and mainly for the purpose of keeping enterprise customers happy. So the home users have to sit around with unpatched vulnerabilities because the enterprise users don't want to have to deal with the random testing periods.

It's idiotic to suggest that preinstallation isn't a problem. Since Windows is preinstalled on most machines, they have a substantially lower bar that they need to clear. Basically they just have to be good enough not to have people switching to OSX or installing Linux on their machine. Whereas OSX and Linux need to be good enough to convince people that they need to switch.

It's mainly a problem of inertia. The large number of independent packages was always a stupid decision to make, but it's less of an issue than the difficulty in buying a desktop that has Linux on it. Most people aren't even aware that Linux is only a kernel, so what makes you think that they're even thinking about the fact that a distro is built of thousands of independent software packages?

And I don't doubt that people return Linux netbooks more often, they've been trained to only know how to use MS products and the netbook OSes have all had feeble versions of Linux installed. I remember Asus was using it's own Linux distro on their Eee PCs and it wasn't a very good distro.
They've changed their definition before, and it's not like they haven't been selling games that they know don't work for a considerable number of people. Granted now they're offering refunds for incompatibility, but I still have a malfunctioning i76 that I bought way before they instituted that policy that has serious issues making it unplayable.

Oh please, just stop with this damn LIE. Other distributors are able to, why GoG isn't? They've less skills? I don't think so. Just admit they don't do enough efforts for it or don't care and that's all…

Regarding the old DOS games, stuff for which game engine recreations for Linux exist and games that run good in Wine:

The least they could do is offer the files without installer.
This way you won't have to install Gog games in Wine/Windows, extract the data files
and THEN switch to your main OS to finally fire up Dosbox/ScummVM/your favorite interpreter.

The new installers even created more barriers.
I start to think, that something fishy is going on here and I won't say what.

Intaller on one archive and data in another and you need both to install the game on Windows or just the data one for Linux, where would be the problem with that?
There are easy solutions to make Linux users happy, but all of them are refused.
I just want to know the real reason, because I feel lied to as much as with the explanations about why not making the existing Linux ports of indie games available here.

There are ways to extract data from installers...
But I don't see what does that have to do with Linux, like at all.

No problem with an effort formulation. It's always about the amount of effort, as good engineers (and I assume GOG are) can solve every problem when enough effort put into it. But as GOG needs to be at least a reasonable merchant, they have to check:
if (price(game) * number_ of_sold_games(game) *marketshare_of_linux(2014) > effort_adapting_&_longtime_support(game,10years)) support_linux(game);

And that this check gets positive either the marketshare of linux needs to increase by an order of magnitude and/or the support effort needs to be reduced by an order of magnitude (meaning not more fragmentation, stable APIs of libs etc).

Both is unlikely to happen as the linux enthusiast either argueing the low marketshare is a "non-issue" or arguing "choice is a strength!" and therefore defend the unsupportable fragmentation mess.

That Steam starts to address Linux is clearly political motivated (and not by economics), they are in fear that MS locks them out. Also they have the financial strength to get into such a risky adventure (ongoing since 3 years, I'm really impressed!)

PS: it is also worth to note that Steam not "supports linux", the create a own platform on top of the unsupportable mess, a steam platform. If this platform will be locked or open, only future can tell.

Funny how Humble Bundle and Desura are able to support Linux.

There is no entity in a modern meaning of OS/platform (read: Android, MacOS, Windows) by the name "linux".

There is only
1.) the kernel, insufficient for software or
2.) the multitude of incompatible linux distros (& incompatible to themselves over version change).

Humble bundle supports only a small subset of the second entity with a significant increased effort compared to the other supported platforms. Take a look on your humble library and count the packages under linux per game and count the packages under windows for comparison. For additional fun, take a look how often the packages gets updated & hotfixed, roughly guessed 10X more on linux (breakages because of distro/lib etc updates).

Barely and with much pain... like Steam

The amount of effort needed for long term support might be not that big. At least one needs to find a way to do it first. GOG isn't even at the stage of saying "we found a way, but the effort doesn't pay off". They seem to be at the stage of "we didn't find a way", and that is what Linux users are upset about.