I have a a few questions about Proton that I was hoping someone on the forum can answer.

Is it possible for GOG to implement Valve's Proton software into Galaxy? I've heard that Proton is open source, but does that mean that other companies can use this software to make their own games compatible with Linux? If so, is this something that can be done relatively easily? I've often heard Valve talking about how easy it is for them to make their games compatible for Linux and they even plan on having 100% Linux compatibility by the end of the year. If that's the case, then why doesn't GOG implement this software into Galaxy and give their users the same courtesy? Seems like a no-brainer to me.

You can just use proton yourself without needing galaxy for anything.

Most likely because GOG is a much much smaller shop than Steam and don't have the manpower to consider it. Besides, Linux support for Galaxy has never been a priority, and I'm being kind here... Proton is a fork of Wine, ergo a native Linux client could interact with it to launch games. But there's no Linux native version of Galaxy in the first place, so...

Besides, you have to use wine to run galaxy on linux anyway.

It would be great if GOG actually devoted a small amount of developers to address this problem, because I think the vast majority of users would much rather have a simple 'one click' solution to get their games to work on Linux. I personally have zero interest in working with Wine or Proton to get my games to work. That's a job for the development team.

Then you personally have zero interest in gaming on Linux outside of Steam. Great, you're hired :P... consider yourself your own development team and pay yourself in DRM-free game time.

Fair enough, but I was assuming this was mostly about running Windows games under Linux, not about native Linux games.

Proton was designed to run through Steam. There are a lot of hacky fixes per game, and there's a lot other features from the native Steam platform that do not exist elsewhere (Valve's Fossilize shader solution for example) that greatly improve the experience and make everything, well, work quite pleasantly.

So you shouldn't run Proton outside of Steam.

Instead run Wine-staging or the custom wines, like wine-ge through Lutris or wine-tkg on its own too.

What you (and a lot of the rest of the Linux gamers) are asking for seems to be a native Linux Galaxy client with added functionality for Wine(s) running under the hood for Windows games. I think that part isn't actually monumental, despite GOG's and Linux critics' best efforts to shout otherwise. After all, it was a one-man job to do all of that already. It's called Heroic (originally an Epic games launcher) and has added GOG gaming now to it. This demonstrates the relative ease of implementing something like this - one guy working for free did it all already.

Which begs the question - do we need GOG to do anything at all? If you explore this further and go deeper down the rabbit hole, you start wondering what the hell are we paying GOG for anyways? What is this 30% cut of theirs meant to contribute to me? Not much, but let's not go there, will just make people sad.

Just at least make the client play nicely with Wine, or buy the guys making the GOG experience bearable a freaking coffee.

I think I speak for the vast majority of Windows users when I say that the only way I will ever move to Linux is when my entire game library works on the platform with very little effort on my part (point and click install). Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Linux and how easy it can be to use, but the gaming side of things has always been severely lacking. Steam is the only PC gaming company that actually cares about developing for Linux, which makes their platform even more enticing to Windows users who want to make the switch to Linux. This is why I've been thinking about switching to Steam.

Not I. I'm keeping Win 10 with my modifications until I cant use it any longer, then I'll switch to ReactOS if it is release ready or Linux if it's not. I have a bit of experience making things work in Linux, so I'm sure I'll be OK as long as search engines still exist.

You’re right, I actually skipped a bit of context when I read your previous message, and forgot that this thread was mainly about WINE/Proton when writing my answer ;)

That's a common misconception among Windows users, that their replacement OS will have to "OS up" in terms of usability in order to get them to switch. That's not how it works. Linux does come with a bit of a learning curve and rough edges. There's some DIY here and there, but it does pay off.

Nobody's asking you to become a power user, but mastering some of the things you're interested in, like how to tune your gaming experience on Linux, is actually a good thing. As with all things outside of one's comfort zone, it does tend to seem very frightening, and does discourage a lot of people, but I assure you that's not really the case any more. It may have been 10-20 years ago, but gaming on Linux has come a very long way since then.

Even if you insist on a "point and click install" experience, there are already some tools available for Linux to help you with that, like Lutris.

I've been watching both Wine and ReactOS for most of the last two decades and in terms of technical advancements it's pretty much a one sided race, with ReactOS sometimes copying Wine's design.

You pay for the games. Most of the 30% goes to running costs - such as paying employees, renting buildings, paying gas and electiricty, maintaining equipment, maintaing the website and makeing assets for it, server and bandwith ciosts, legal costs associated with each new game added (and if there are any problems), bookepping and financial, paying taxes, customer support and so on.

edit - and not forget, hookers and blow don't pay themselves.