I don't use Galaxy, so I guess, I have no horse in this race.

But..:
I also don't see the benefits of using a third party launcher, if there's an in-house launcher already available.

So, needless to say, that - IF they'd ever switch to this "Heroic" launcher (which I don't see happen, honestly)...I wouldn't use that either.

shrug

You might want to check out ZorinOS. I had exactly the same opinion of Linux before making the switch a few months ago. It is one of the easiest, most stable distros on the market, and the vast majority of your games will work perfectly fine (Steam, GOG, Epic, Itch, Amazon etc). Linux has actually come a really long way in only a few years.

I still don't see how launchers are "more convenient" in any way. As far as I can tell they are entirely pointless and have been embraced by the gaming community at large through nothing but thoughtless "herd mentality", and all they really do is facilitate things that are outright harmfull to gaming like DRM and achievements.

I use PlayNite. There are a lot of benefits of using PlayNite over Galaxy, and I would expect that it would be the same for those that use the Heroic Launcher...

1. I own several game bundles from itch, and the bulk of these games are not on GOG and therefore also not in Galaxy by default. Getting them into Galaxy means creating an account with Twitch just so that I can manually add them myself to the IGDB, waiting for it to be approved by the IGDB, then waiting up to 48 hours for it to show up in Galaxy.

2. I also own a bunch of compilation discs because hidden object games with silly plots are a bit of a guilty pleasure. Yea! Let's go investigating things I'm totally not qualified to be investigating, engage in numerous acts of breaking and entering, and go digging through junk piles full of rusty things. While a lot of these games are on the IGDB, the IGDB is under the delusion that they were not released on PC so I have to add the PC release information to make it show up in Galaxy because otherwise they don't. This means finding the game on the IGDB, making a change to show the PC release date information, waiting for the change to be approved, then waiting 48 hours for it to show up in Galaxy. In these cases, you have to also prove that the game was released on Windows PC by including a link to the game's mobygames listing in the changelog entry.

3. Even when a game does show up in the IGDB with all the proper info so that it can show up in Galaxy, it still won't show up in Galaxy if the title is too short. ᗢ is a delightful game where you play as a black cat and because the title is just one character, it won't show up in Galaxy. I've determined when I was using Galaxy that the title needs to be at least three characters long. For those games with very short titles, you have to find some other game to cannibalize so that it can appear in your Galaxy library, and the problem with doing this is that you can't update info in Galaxy to make it match up with the game you want to add because the data is being pulled off the IGDB.

4. If you don't agree with a game's listed genre, too bad for you if you use Galaxy. I consider Basements n' Basilisks, Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery and South of the Circle to all all be visual novels. Yes, I'm well aware that none of these games are listed as visual novels on GOG because the developers/publishers don't want to market them as such. However when I go to play any of those games again, it will be entirely because I'm in the mood to play a visual novel. The genre isn't just people harems that the player is trying to get in bed with.

5. There's an arbitrary limit in Galaxy when it comes to cover and background art. Once you hit that limit, you're stuck with janky artwork and missing images.... or you can just start deleting games. That always works.


PlayNite doesn't make managing a game library feel like I have an unpaid job that involves helping manage the IGBD. If I want to manually add a game to my library, I can add it without having to turn to a third-party website. If I don't agree with the game genre that a developer wants to market their game as, I can list it as what I think it is. There's also no arbitrary limit on images that makes you stuck with missing and janky art. As of today, PlayNite is now prompting me to backup PlayNite metadata - which is another thing in its favor.

I'm sure that the Heroic Launcher is just as lovely but since I discovered PlayNite first, that's the one I use.

Now that Heroic has achievements and Galaxy multiplayer through it's comet support (which you can just toggle on in the current version), it has basically achieved feature parity with Galaxy. At least, I can't think of something that's missing in Heroic, on Linux or Windows or Mac. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Considering Heroic makes the Linux GOG experience not only bearable, but pretty damn good, it should indeed be supported. Like it is apparently, so thanks GOG! Keep it up, please. It's the future.

Galaxy runs like hot garbage. You can't even download Galaxy if you happen to be browsing on Linux. That's just prejudist ;)

That part, I can relate to. I got a Windows box strictly for gaming a few years back (my main computer is on Linux) and I feel like I just kicked the problem further in the timeline rather than resolve it.

Not sure about Heroic, but Lutris is looking good. I'll need to give that a try when I have a bit more time.

As a long term Ubuntu user, I can atterst that the UI experience is not as polished as Windows or MacOS (though underneat Gnome which is the default UI solution for Ubuntu, I can attest that the OS itself and many of the surrounding system tools are first-class).

However, the guiltier parties here for lack of Linux support for many games is not the Linux communities, but the gaming ecosystem.

Windows has first class support in gaming, not because Microsoft is doing anything amazing there, but because both gpu manufacturers and game devs catter to it.

I get that it has the lion's share of the user base, but increasingly, multi-platform game engine makes it more and more trivial to support Linux natively, and yet many indie and AA devs don't. At this point, I think it is just complacency.

In fact, I think that projects like Wine do an incredible amount of work in reverse engineering to support Windows native applications in Linux, so I'd argue that Linux communities do a lot more work there then Microsoft actually.

Kill all the clients. Offline installers ONLY via secure torrents is all GOG needs. If they knew how to make a torrent that is...

I doubt that falls in with their agenda to coerce us all to use Galaxy.

The more they tighten their grip the more systems slip through their fingers....

Hotter take: both Galaxy and Heroic should be ditched.

What systems would those be?

So you're cool with having to manually install your 500-1000+ games whenever you reinstall your OS?

I own more than 3 000 games, but I don’t see the point in having all of them installed at once. I keep backups of all of them, and only install the ones I am currently playing or testing. I don’t see how a games client/launcher would help with that.

Anyway, I use a modern OS that does not need to be reinstalled.

At this point, even though I love Galaxy (issues and all), I'd have to agree. Either they need to support Heroic or Playnite. Playnite is my preference on Windows, I really do wish it could get a Linux release, because it's basically the definitive game client these days.

That's still DRM. ANYTHING that sits between you and the installer is Digital Rights Management regardless how one coats it with aspartame.