GOG seems to be an awesome games marketplace (DRM free? Hell yes!), with potential to even compete at some level with steam.
Linux, if anybody has been living under a rock for the last 5 years, is absolutely exploding. My GF has linux on her machine. My mum even uses linux. It's penetrating every corner of the market, and is easily the fastest growing platform out there.

If GOG keeps pretending like linux doesn't exist, it will be left in the dust - chewed up and spat out and forgotten.

GOG has the last chance to address Linux support this year. If they won't - they'll fail and their claims that they are innovative would be false. It would be a pity, since GOG is the only DRM free distributor.

Meanwhile GOG is dragging feet with Linux support, Trine 2 (DRM free Linux version) in the Humble Store for $2: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/p/trine2complete_storefront

The numbers are still relatively small in terms of gamers.

It's an issue of the chicken and the egg, but that being said, I think a lot of people would settle for just getting the Linux version and having it not supported by GOG. At this point there isn't even a good way of telling GOG that we want Linux support and how many of us there are that want it.

It seems to me that GOG is at risk of getting behind the 8 ball on this one.

There is a pretty good way for GOG users to let GOG know that we want Linux support. Vote for that freature request:

https://secure.gog.com/wishlist/site/add_linux_versions_of_games

And GOG has also site visitors statistics in addition (though they never made it public).

Yes, but for most of the Linux users, why they would come here as this site don't sell anything for them? The humble store seems more indicated…
Btw, I'm too lazy to change my user-agent, I'm a very high Linux supporter and user, but at the moment on a Mac OS computer. So these statistics are a little bit useless and inaccurate…

They're not the only one : the humble store or places like indiegamestand sell DRM-free games too.
But they're the only one to sell ONLY DRM-free game. And that difference is important (at least for me).
Let's continue to hope…

What about DotEmu? Wasn't it a DRM-free service like GOG is? Has that changed?

This, but it's even getting rather hard to draw that line as I discovered with Bard's Tale (2004).

The Humble Store is pretty perfect. Their catalogue is of course rather humble, but it's a lot of the same indies that everyone else is selling, and what GOG.com seems to be betting their future business on. I really don't know how they plan to succeed while not even offering the same options.

I meant completely DRM-free and it makes a difference for me as well (though I'm using the Humble Store).

They're still pretty low at the moment, but like everything linux and open source, they are definitely rising. That's why GOG would do well to get ahead of the trend.
As you say, it's a bit "chicken and egg" - there's few games for linux because there's few linux gamers, and there's few linux gamers because there's not a lot of games that work on linux.

However, if I had to guess, this will all change in the next couple of years with the steambox and steamOS, not to mention last I heard the PS4 is linux based.

The PS4 operating system is based on FreeBSD which is UNIX, Linux is UNIX-like.

Indeed, that's neither useless nor inaccurate but reflect the reality pretty representative: truth is, even among (the small number) of vocal linux proponents there are many, many dual booters and MacOS users...

Who complain for instance when they get "caught" by the user survey of Steam using WINE or Windows. Bizarre. ;P Also, if they are even to lazy to fake the user agent while using MacOS, it is obvious why such users switched to MacOS as desktop OS in first place: linux as desktop is still to hard and work intensive to use (for them and most). Frankly, the linux desktop is still not ready for prime-time. And GOG has seen that, and can't be blamed for responding reasonable to that by "evaluating the situation carefully from the side-line". The side who is to blame is the linux distro ecosystem which failed now for decades to provide a reasonable, unified, working desktop OS platform.

Yeah, there is a demand, movement, understanding since approx. the beginning of the 2000s that "open" technologies could be a benefit in many domains. Therefore it is highly indicative that in the 1.5 decades in-between no "open" desktop OS took off, while in many other domains open technologies were successful (also on the desktop): browser -> Firefox (now majority in most countries), mobile phone OS -> android (sky-rocketing to the top), proprietary encyclopedias -> wikipedia (killed britanica, encarta etc in a small number of years).

The reason why no open desktop (namely, linux) took of is not the "open" nature, but the technical and cultural legacy as unix, server, geek OS. If an open desktop OS with a suitable architecture (like or [url=http://www.reactos.org/]Reactos) would have got the buzz linux got in last ten years we would have a dominant open desktop OS platform for 5 years already. :/

That's a complete load. Linux hasn't been hard to use in at least 10 years. Assuming you choose Mint or one of the other user friendly distros. My Dad switched to Linux a couple months ago and I gave him basically no instructions on how to use it.

There's commercial software that isn't supported under Linux and a few drivers that aren't; but it's a rather bizarre definition of hard and work intensive when Windows requires far more effort to keep running properly. A couple weeks back, I had to clean up my friend's computer. With Linux it would have taken maybe a half hour, at most, it wound up taking me 3-4 hours because Windows isn't very user friendly and still sucks when it comes to security.

People wind up using both in large part because there are things like games that aren't available. I have no interest in running Windows every again for the simple reason that it's not a very good OS and MS shows no interest in improvement. Apart from the difficulties in procuring a laptop without Windows, I wouldn't even have 7.
It took about 15 years for the desktop in general to take off before it was mainstream. Apple released Lisa in like 1983 or so and it wasn't until the late '90s that everybody was buying computers.

Once you've got the inertia that only an illegal monopoly can provide, it's a rather durable shield against competition.

Your are talking about the installing of the distro (which is often fine) or the andecdotal "mother/father" use case, where a admin (in this case you) maintain the system and the users' need in apps and adaption is very rudimentary (ironically, more or less the terminal use-case unix was used for the 70-80s). Linux fails in the PC use case, the open platform use case: third party ISVs provide a software (outside the repository), deploys it (by download/disc whatever) and the user himself select it, installs it, updates it. Here the fragmented linux distro infrastructure fails horrible (reason why Steam builts now everything on top themself), because of missing stable interface between system and apps. For instance, MacOS and Android did it right here.

Not really. You could run XP for decades now stable WITH bleeding edge software all the time & a selection of software in the millions (provided by ISVs). With the linux distro system you have to update your complete system every 6 month & to pray that everything works afterward fine (and still outdated software on the end of the 6 month) Not to count the enourmous problems and time investments if you try to install software NOT available in your small distro repository (merely ten-thousands typically). Either you run into dependency problems which you have to fix manually or you have to understand arcane compiler errors in your effort to compile for your very specific distro... in short, third party apps are a pain under linux (confimed by Ian Murdock:"Software installation on Linux: Today, it sucks" or Molnar: "What ails the Linux desktop? ").

I know it is easier to blame some mysterious monopoly than accepting that the linux ecosystem has serious problems in itself, but Mozilla and Android proved already that monopolistic situations can be broken and changed very fast. The linux desktop had 15 years time already and failed to deliver consistently. The harsh conclusion must be, the problem is intrinsical (not "bad guy MS"m or stupid users or pre-installed systems or whatever).

You really have closed mind, do you?
Firstly, I'm on MacOS because of a half-choice I didn't really had. Not because Linux "is bad". I used exclusively without dual-boot, VM or some other cheats Linux for more than 3 years. NEVER had any issues.
It's only GOG decision to don't support it, especially as lots of recent indie games GOG sell are already available on Linux elsewhere (guess where…?) and there are no excuse for these games.
The ecosystem? As I already mentioned before, but you still don't take note of this, proprietary editor can provide things very well : http://deb.opera.com/ with repositories for example or like Humble Bundle do without repositories.

And when you speak about Firefox success : no need to install something on it, and it had been successful partly because of IE inertia for years and because of free and good innovations like tabs. Tabs were created by Opera but at this time Opera was a paid browser and Firefox got them after among other things (like extensions which were very popular, especially AdBlock Plus) for free.
Android? Oh, sure, the thing pre-installed and shipped on more than 85/90% of sold phone? Like Windows is? Oops. Did I said the problem is the same?

EDIT : And for your information, it's pretty much equal for me to work on Mac OS or Linux (at one exception : I've to do some piracy on OS X because even some very little tools are sold at abusive prices while you have pretty much everything for free on Linux), but no way to work on Windows. Too much security problems. Too bad FS. Not even multi-desktop while these two OS have it for years now, the terminal is a joke, bad font encode (unicode ? probably they don't know this word…), package manager structure which is wonderful (even on Mac OS, you've homebrew, macport or fink) and I probably forgot lots of things…

I follow the technical development of linux very detailed for years now, and I also noticed the arrival of the HIB with great pleasure. And I have seen the rejection of too many technologies which could help ISVs providing third party apps in a reasonable way too often: often because the distros feared they could loose importance and also because some unix traditionalist thought "what worked somehow for decades must be therefore good enough for the next decades, don't touch the architecture!" One example is developed by Ryan Gordon, the genius who provides 90% of the HIB ports to linux, another one [url=http://web.archive.org/web/20080331092730/http://www.linux.com/articles/60124]Autopackage which could have ended the painful distro fragmentation.

Android != another linxu distro. android has a platform approach where typical linux distros are stuck with a monolithic "all integrated" distro approach from the 70s.
In general the preinstalltion myth was debunked with the netbooks, which were originally a linux domain. But users hated it and the return rate were excessive, which was fixed with availability of XP, a real PC OS.