steppenwolf3447: GOG's Linux support has been appalling for as long as I can remember. Since the Wticher 2 Linux port fiasco, CDP basically ignores Linux users. Why they even bother providing Linux installers anymore is a mystery to me. Either support it fully (to the best of your ability) or drop the official support, don't half ass it.
Lately, wine, Lutris and, ironically, Steam (through Proton) have done more for DRM-free gaming than GOG.
Steam and DRM-free ... well, if you say so. The whole point why I am here on GOG and not on Steam is precisely because Steam isn't really DRM-free, I mean, at all.
I'm not familiar with what went wrong with the Linux port of Witcher 2. But I agree that it often goes the wrong way. Steam has had a few good developers as far as I can tell. There were a few speeches from the Steam Dev Days on Youtube which showed how a Linux port is done properly and how Linux support should go.
I wouldn't be so harsh. If they provide a Linux port it usually works. For me anyway. I mean, I don't really like the strange installers GOG provide: Mojo-scripts with an archive embedded. Not my thing and it also completely breaks with the file system standard (I wonder why that exists...), which drives me up the wall. They do installers for Linux as if Linux was Windows 95. It's terrible, I agree. They treat Linux as if it was a toy-operating system, single user only, install software wherever, basically a DOS for snobs, right, afterall Linux only has a command-line. We all know that.
At the same time I can't help to notice that people who want to run casual games have been buying Apple iMacs and the likes, which makes no sense to me. Most of the gaming and computing is still Windows-based, we can't ignore that. That is one reason that Linux support has always been slow. I at least think it has picked up in recent years, but it is still lagging.
As for GOG: I'd prefer to have the tarballs back as it was in the beginning. At least they gave me an easy option to store the games into the /opt folder where they belong.
GOG if you read that: Give us the tarballs back! They were just better. Wine is just a toy. It has always been unreliable, unstable and crashy. It crashed on me twice trying (and failing) to run Anno 1602 A.D. (the first game in the series) and took the whole operating system with it into the abyss. That's just one example. Wine is a no for me. I'd rather run Windows than Wine. The only exception to that is when I need to run a piece of 16-bit Windows-software. Then I don't have any choice short of installing an older version of Windows into a VM.
Edit: corrections for typos