PlayOnLinux makes it just a few clicks away ;) I always install games in individual Wine prefixes anyway, to make things more flexible.

PlayOnLinux is generally a nice tool. Now when I said that, I can criticize it. :P What I don't like about GOL is: outdated scripts, hdd space wasting and trying too much to automate everything. :)

But I don't judge people that are using it (I did before too). It really does make things easier. ;)

Have you tried Lutris, btw?

I never use their scripts, I install games manually and only use PlayOnLinux as Wine manager for decoupling Wine prefixes for games from Wine versions and easier installations of games in those prefixes. Some extra space used for each Wine prefix doesn't bother me, I don't have thousands of games installed in Wine in order for it to become some concern and I have a 2 TB hard drive. That said, I look inside POL scripts once in a while, if some game installation doesn't go well.

I saw Lutris mentioned before, but I didn't really understand what it offers, besides being like a master manager for a bunch of emulators. Can you explain how exactly do you use it and what it's about?

I don't. I tought maybe you do. Or anyone following this topic. I tried it once but couldn't figure it out. I read it has changed since than but haven't tried again.

It's supposed to be some kind of a generic game manager.

Huh. I'll have to give it a try to be sure, but it looks like I'll be contributing various enhancements to that once I've got some free time.

(I was planning on writing something similar and I was also planning to use Python. So far, I've mostly just written code for extracting lists of already-installed games from XDG menus, Desura, and PlayOnLinux and started on a heuristic scraper for doing something similar for games which came via tarball.)

Thanks!

It's a little bit annoying to have to type it out every time, so an easy toggle-able filter would still be a nice feature, but this works.

Perhaps, the games list could just default to what ever OS you are browsing the site on currently.

Bad idea…
I think I’m one in many to browse the site from a GNU/Linux OS, but downloading games for multiple OS.

Not ideal for Linux users. We still rely heavily on Windows installers and things like innoextract+DOSBox/ScummVM/CorsixTH/etc. and PlayOnLinux for all the games that haven't yet been renegotiated for official Linux release.

I did not mean that you could not access the WIndows/OSX games in your library from Linux, its just the first thing you see by default would be the titles for your current OS

He's probably saying the same thing I am. That it's pointless hassle if 99% of the time, I'm just going to run into the extra click and wait time to switch back to a complete listing.

Yep, pretty much what I was going to say ;)
Optional filters are fine, but they should not be applied by default.

On Dos games I wouldn't mind if they just let you download a package with the games ziped up with no installers or anything. As it is to run Master of Magic through linux's dosbox I had to run the GOG installer through WINE and move all the files over to my dos folder. I can write a launcher\config script for it but I have quite a few dos games and honest to goodness don't mine launching games manually.

It's really not that much trouble anyway, but it would be convenient to just be able to download the files w\o an installer.


I don't honestly see peoples issues with GOG only supporting a few mainstream distros. Linux is really flexible and if something doesn't work on your system because you lack this or that it's not unreasonable to expect you to figure out how to get it. There's nothing you can't change, given enough skill, and you really should pick a distro that fits your skill level. If your skill level is 'basic user' then you pretty much should have a mainstream distro anyway. If you know what you need well enough to bare-bones it with puppy linux or tiny core then you can make your GOG game run on that system by picking and choosing what you need, and you don't need or even want someone else's help making that happen (other than someone giving you a clear list of dependencies and requirements and such) . If you're building a customized ArchLinux, well, you should know what you're doing there and be able to make things work.

I'm very happy that GOG is going in the linux support direction. They're supporting not only the most popular but the most user friendly (I ran XP for a long time but Corel Linux before that, now that I'm back to Linux things seem so easy compared to last time it feels like I'm cheating, I love it) versions. That's all I'd ask for.

You don't need Wine for that. You can use innoextract. See more details here.

Yep, for dos games I still download the windows installer. Use innoextract to extract the contents delete the tmp directory and rename the app directory to the game name. Then it's just a quick configure of DBGL.