I have Galaxy installed, but play games only when it's not running because the way it announces whatever you are playing to other people really freaks me out. Galaxy is nice in that it allows you to selectively disable gameplay tracking, automatic updates, achievement tracking and the overlay, but you can't disable sharing your presence or activity yet. If that changes then I'd probably use it regularly.

I use it, it's okay.

I use it to install my Wine games. It's not great, but works faster than installing manually.

Heh... I've played almost every GoG game I own (and that's going on 1200) and have never seen a need for Galaxy yet. And when I do, then I'll be done with Gog. Boycotted Steam for the first 6 or so years till it was obvious that stupid decision had been made by "gamers" and then decided to go ahead and use it. So if a client becomes necessary here I'll just be done with Gog and use the one client I'm already using. One is one too many. Two is way too many.

My gaming PC is offline, so I don't see any benefit to using Galaxy.

I use it because I find cloud saves to be really useful. As long as Galaxy (as well as his bunch of features) is optional, it's ok for everyone, I suppose.

I can't really say I don't like it because I've never tried it. I just don't think I need a client to manage my games. Achievements, cloud saves means nothing to me and I don't play multiplayer games (perhaps local and some times ago PBEM AoW). Of course I don't criticize features like achievements or cloud saves - if somebody enjoys/uses them - good for her/him. They are not appealing for me and thus I don't see a single reason to install Galaxy. So it's not that I don't like it I just don't use it.

One of the main goals to preserving older games over the longer run is to minimise the number of intermediate software dependencies. To a lot of people, "needing" a client does the opposite and adds another loop in the chain. At the moment that "extra loop" (Galaxy) is optional, however the fear for many is if GOG stopped providing offline installers and if Galaxy became as compulsory as Steam (ie, the actual install process was online-only in future via only one method (Galaxy)), then in the event anything happened to GOG, "DRM-free" becomes pretty meaningless if you can't actually access your games to install via a client that tries to download from a shutdown server with no option of being able to reinstall from an offline installer backed up onto a local HDD)...

A lot of people don't "hate" Galaxy, (and hopefully GOG will be around for a LONG time to come), they just place more value on keeping a local offline installer copy for better preservation of being able to re-install them 100% offline DRM-free, (and not just play them DRM-free whilst still being reliant on an online server for a 2nd, 3rd, etc, reinstall) whilst not really caring about achievements, cloud saves, etc.

GoG Galaxy ate ChaosFox's hamster.

:)

I use Galaxy but I'm not thrilled with it. For many months lots of my Cloud saves would refuse to sync, no matter how many times I tried. Those bugs seems to have disappeared for me with the more recent client updates.

Due to other bugs that still seem to be present, for some games, my playtime as recorded by the client randomly gets erased down to 0 minutes. And then it starts counting again, while neglecting to account for all my previous playtime.

Furthermore, I have no idea why Galaxy doesn't feature user profiles that are just like Steam's. And while they are at it, they should also imitate every other Steam feature, except for turning the client itself into mandatory DRM.

I'm not sure why they claim that Galaxy is "out of beta" because it's still mighty buggy & half-baked & incomplete.

Nope, not me. I had it installed for a while, and it worked ok-ish, except I didn't really need it for anything and see little benefit to its usage (which is just the way I like it :) ). Also, the (back-then, at least) non-optional auto-updates drove me up the wall. I take it that's all under control by now?

And, just to mention it, I use Gameplay Time Tracker for keeping tabs on gaming time. It's not very pretty to look at, but I find it very handy, and it gets the job done without a lot of fuss.

That's not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes new patches add zero value for the majority of users yet also introduce new game-breaking bugs for all users who install it. And the bug-filled new patches do not disclose that they contain bugs in their notes, thus the user may well have no idea that a new patch is the cause for why his or her game stopped working properly.

What do you mean by "none-optional auto-updates?

For me this drm client is spyware in the sense that a) GOG gets more information from me (os, pc components, ...) than they need and b) can and maybe already do collect them on their servers. Good things is ... If they do, they most probably cannot analyse the data because of incompetence (like their forum software, their „we will always somehow fuck up every sale“, their „we promis fixes we never deliver“ and so on).
Besides that I will never support this software, which already has quite a few exceptions to their official motto „totally optional“.