AndrewC: You really consider the ability to mount images a basic functionality? Really? Fucking really? I mean, my mind boggles here.
Yes. Pretty basic. On Linux we have mount and fuseiso pretty much easily available. On Windows - nothing out of the box, until you fiddle with daemontools.
gooberking: When did we get to, Cross platform installers are hard screw Linux? I thought we were looking for some way to make games run on it, not pursue some utopian idea of how to get one installer to work for everyone. Baby steps.
Why are you guys beating the dead horse all this time? There are good and working installers around which support many modern distros. What's the point in reinventing the wheel? Did you test Torchlight? It has a very decent installer, which adapts to DEB or RPM backend (I didn't test others) and creates native package and then installs it. Very decently done and works completely through the GUI (probably it has CLI fallback also).
Let me repeat it again - packaging and distribution (writing a client or what not) doesn't bother GOG. They can do it. As far as I understood what supposedly bothers GOG is supporting games functionally on various distros (i.e. running them as gooberking said above). I.e. when it comes to users relying on PulseAudio, Alsa, OSS4, Nvidia drivers or not Nvidia drivers and etc. etc. That's where things start requiring adjustments. Experienced users overcome them, novices are puzzled by them. GOG thinks that all novices would flood them with support requests. That's what I think is their main concern, and not some subject of how to package their releases.
The point which GOG misses, is that the vast majority of Linux gamers are experienced Linux users. GOG should take that in consideration, instead of being too paranoid. Nothing prevents them from experimenting with few releases, and checking out how well they work out (call it alpha Linux support and get feedback, instead of being super perfectionist and do nothing until it'll be ideal).
GOG should not adopt this kind of logic...
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