TBH, I don't either. The main issues I have with it are that it's not yet available on all supported platforms and I don't believe that there's a way of telling it to download all the games you have in the languages that you're using.

Personally, I just use lgogdownloader in a VM as it does both of those things efficiently. But, it would be nice to be able to ditch the VM.

Paranoia? Nope, just basic logic: If you let someone else control your stuff, then - surprise! - they get to control your stuff. And this control won't necessarily be in your own interest.

Well actually, today's surveillance society is WAY more extreme than what Big Brother had in '1984'. And that says a lot, considering that the novel was a dystopia, that is, a fictive story where the author envisions his worst, most paranoid vision of the future.

Pictured: the world moving on, for your convenience.

I agree, there's many reasons why forcing a manual upgrade is a good idea. The biggest reason being that if something breaks, you at least know when the breakage happened. Not to mention cases where saves aren't compatible between versions.

I honestly doubt using Galaxy since it's inception would have saved me enough time to even walk to nearest one. It comes with it's own problems, and manually downloading a game and installing it really isn't nearly as much of a chore as some people who so badly need this "convenience" make it seem. I guess that's what I find baffling the most, the fact that people act as if donwloading a couple of files and double clicking on the installer took hours or something. It's a matter of seconds, maybe a minute for heaven's sake.

Depends on the game. Being able to click install, go to sleep/work/make lunch and return to find the game already installed is better than clicking download, going to sleep/work/make lunch, return, double click the installer and wait another two minutes to two hours for the game to install. The benefit of automatic installation is not the time difference between method one and method two, but what you can actually do between the first click and being able to play.
If you already have the installers available though, the preparation is pretty much the same.

If you stop at that, download, install, play, forget, all is fine then. No client needs to be involved there. But if you really want to "control" your collection there is all the organizing, archiving, backing up the archives, managing updates, versioning, re-checking media periodically and backing it up again...

From where I'm sitting I can see boxes of floppy disks, CD's, Zip disks (anybody remember those? 100 Mb!!!), and even backup tapes. There was no other way back then, and it was even fun when I had time, but now I'm more than happy with downloading installers and extras just once through Galaxy, dump it all in a couple of hard disks for redundancy and forget about the whole thing until, maybe and unlikely, one day I decide to redownload everything to get a new snapshot of my collection. In any case, I'm definitely not going through the hassle of incrementally updating my archives with patches, versions, etc.

Edit: I'm well aware of the existence of tools like gogrepo.py, and surely it's a great solution. It's just that, if I have to use some tool, I'm fine with the "official" one.

The world has moved on, ha, thats amusing. Its moved somewhere but I was thinking of other directions.
Let me copy the title of the thread "Please stop auto updating my games" - cause is that the person uses "convenient" software to take this task away. Solution, don't use that software and do it yourself. Problem solved.
Where is the paranoia in that? The sites main selling point is DRM free, I.e stopping third party software/control from your access to the product. Using a client merely adds some of that back in?
Indeed, which is where the archiving part comes in. Keeping the installers means only having to download a patch maybe in the future (unless its terraria - I think its that one - which gets loads of updates but no patches) however I wonder how many people actually use G to store the installers? Few if any, far simpler to just click play and wait for download setup, rely on the store to keep the files then panic download when it closes.

Just spent the last 3 months re-cataloging all my collections, backups etc into one consistent block on a raid, with easy file mirroring to another raid and separate external HDD. Collections all moved from excel to db, and the db now maintains the folder structure integrity. Makes it nice and easy for the future as I can now programmatically move the whole thing into any future requirement. Not as satisfying as ordering a shelf, but highly effective.

To me it depends what games we are talking about. Games that receive updates often and especially online multiplayer games which expect all players be on the same patch levels => yes please, auto-update my games.

But then when I think about many of my old PC retail games for which I have more problems finding patches nowadays, I kinda wish I would have gone through them earlier and downloaded all the latest patches manually, and not rely that "sure someone will keep them available online from here to eternity".

I was wishing patches-scrolls.de would be my go-to site for getting the updates for my old retail games, but for some reason I have trouble downloading anything from them anymore. Have their download servers gone offline? Also I am not quite sure if some updates they've had before have been removed...

That's also why I'm in the bandwagon of having backed up all my GOG games already now, instead of waiting if and when GOG will eventually go the way of DotEmu, Desura etc.

Since I have "only" a 10Mbit/s internet line, it is also about convenience for me for the bigger games. If I get an urge to try some bigger game quickly (say, Witcher 3), it is far faster for me to just install it from my external HDD, than downloading/installing it through a client. Having my own local collection of installers allows me to be more impulsive.

I guess people with 150Mbit/s couldn't care less, they download several gigabyte games in a matter of minutes I guess. For me it means extra hours of waiting, not very impulsive anymore. I kinda have that problem with many of my Steam games, I think "I wonder if I should try that game I have on Steam?", but then realize that since it is so big and I have to wait for it to download/install for several hours (or even the whole night), I just forget about the idea. Maybe later (or not)...

Then avoid selecting the put icon on desktop option when first installing the game...
This will solve the problem.
For me it's a must, because I keep an eye on what has been changed on my HD.
I have a good firewall, but if I let programs like galaxy go throught it, better monitor what it does for check the amount used on data downloading with the effective needed.
Until now there was no problems in this way except when I use it for browse the main page for check purchases. Browsing throught the client use higher amount of data than keeping it on the background.

It would be really nice if there would be a default setting for Auto Updates On or Off that could be set in the preferences, so you do not have to do this too often if you want automatic updates only in a minor number of cases or not at all but otherwise want to use Galaxy.

This isn't really any difficult. GOG developers are just a lazy bunch of ...

What I wanted to say is that Galaxy is not beta anymore and you can expect such goodies.

When you install a game you can disable imediatly the auto update. If it is a problem for you, why havent you disabled it directly instaling the game/s?