Maybe the linux users and enthusiasts should overcome their anger on this rejection ("What, gog don't agrees that linux is the best thing since sliced bread?") and fix instead humbly the barriers for adoption by gog. Several ideas & proposals what could & should be done in the linux ecosystem for fixing it for commercial vendors and ISVs are well known....

I just give up to debate with you. You're so much narrow-minded that it's just useless to continue…
Solo developers are able to do what GoG isn't even able. And more important, these developers provide, sell and distribute games working on Linux themselves, without any intermediary. But yes, for sure, they do the wrong way, it's a bad idea 'cause Linux have a bad ecosystem and blah and blah…
Some can, because they wish to. Some others "can't" just because they don't want. No need to look further.
I don't speak about the old game from 1993 working on DOS or the last AAAAA license developed with Direct X 15.3 but of the games developed to be multi-OS and sold as it on some platforms and in the same time on GoG.

But, ops, I'm wrong. They all took the wrong way to do so, they shouldn't even think to offer something on this awful OS not even sold on computers, where not even Microsoft offer their softwares nor Apple, where you can't even offer freely (as in freedom) all the stuff you want without any control…(did I said a mistake…hum, sorry)… … …irony (just to be sure).

Porkepix: games sold by developers (in the current form) or other distributors don't guarantee long term support. For example, Loki used to sell various games (such as Rune: http://www.lokigames.com/products/rune/ which is available on GOG as well). This was first released on Linux in 2001. I tried to run Rune demo (you can still find it on-line) on the modern Linux. It failed (in contrast, GOG's version of Rune run just fine using Wine) so it shows that 13 years is more than enough to break compatibility of running it simply on top of the distro without some kind of long term support approach that could isolate it in a way that could make it runnable. That is what GOG attempts to devise I guess (not sure about 13 years support though, but you still get the idea).

I understand your frustration, I'm frustrated too.... for fifteen years linux failed to deliver us a free and open source desktop OS platform. Somewhere something wrong happened indeed, but I doubt it was you or me.

I am a noob and am using Linux Mint for some months now.
It's easy to use and every game from HB I tried worked great,
Unepic from Gog ran good with Wine too.

I've read about compatibility problems in Win7 and Win8 though, so Linux does not seem to be THAT special regarding compatibility issues.

If Gog wants some installers so badly, they should use .deb
because it's fully recognized by many sorts of Debian/Ubuntu/Mint which most linux people are using anyway,
but I myself prefer simple archives that run on even more distros, like tar.gz.
Whoever uses Linux knows how to use them anyway, even n00bs like me.

Nobody here is asking for such stuff though, all people want is the files that are already available elsewhere.

But I forgot: They simply just do not care. :/
Well, I have to put money elsewhere then as it seems,
which is sad, because I really liked GoGs approach and think, that they have done a lot for todays gamers and still do regarding good old games (not the new ones).

WinXP was my last MS system and nobody will change that,
instead I just hope, that things will change in the long run, it's looking good atm, although not here in this regard.

GOG, if you are that afraid of investing in Linux support as you are not sure if it is worth the financial commitment, why not bring The Witcher to Linux, sell it through Steam only, and see what the sales numbers are like? I will even buy it again through Steam just to convince you.

The GoG version you're talking about is, as a maximum, 5 years old (the age of GoG). Let's see if in 8 years it will run as perfectly as today on modern system (and I already think that OSs will evolve more slowly in the 10 next years than in the 10 past. But let's say it'll be the same speed).

And maybe there are not that much hard way to fix it, I don't know at all.

They didn't failed. They success, at least for me and for another bunch of peoples.
Don't say they failed, just tell that it doesn't fit to you which isn't at all the same.

Nothing more to say, but some peoples here seems to still have difficult to understand…
Tarball files are fine. .deb even if not perfect can be adapted not that much hard in rpm and on archlinux at least and probably other places and the community can do it well. Even .bin can works (the famous binary files…), let's see VMWare (yeah, a professional tool) setup for example.

Unless GOG is using the original game from 2000, then it's more than 5 years old. Wine in general preserves certain stable API (Win XP for example), so quite old games can be expected to run there. Linux as is (and even Windows itself) never guarantees such stability, so that's why I said, that if GOG plans such long term support, they need to find a proper solution. I think Docker can solve quite a lot of related issues.

As of OS evolving - I hope innovation won't slow down, at least in the Linux world it's not, but Windows is noticeably slowing down indeed. It shows that MS is falling behind and isn't interested in innovation anymore.

I appreciate that the technical base is there, linux COULD indeed form the desktop OS platform everyone is waiting for.
But practically the linux desktop lacks seriously. Like a meal, composed from the finest and best components, but messed up by an incompetent chef. You can see that the result had the potential for some greatness but failed in the very last step. For me, the linux desktop is for some tasks OK, for some tasks even great (I'm a developer), but several crucial aspects indeed don't t fit my expectations for a PC OS & a free and open source OS.

But my personal experience doesn't matter, what really matters on the end of day is the market-share which shows that the linux desktop is not OK for most people: 98% PC users are not fine with the linux desktop. I think it is safe to conclude this means "failure" in general.

Linux PC market share is growing, even according to the non globally representative Web counters.

Sure, as you still deny some of the reasons of this market share…
No need to repeat which ones, you perfectly know them.

With unequal chances, for sure the result is unequal too.

If that's happening that frequently, the developers need to hire a few programmers that know what they're doing. Normally libraries will be symlinked with a stable name and not change unless there's a major revision. This allows for programs to run when there's a minor revision without having to be adjusted to require a new name. The director /usr/lib has crapload of links there for that very reason.

I'm curious, how long have you been working for MS? Most of what you're claiming hasn't been true in ages.


I find the notion that you're a developer very hard to believe, given what you just said about libraries. If it were actually true, then companies like Codeweavers and Hamrick would have serious issues releasing the same binaries for all Linux distros.

ScummVM isn't "emulated". It's a from-scratch rewrite of various game engines (originally just LucasArts SCUMM) for modern platforms.

If you consider ScummVM "emulated" then:
- All LucasArts adventure games are emulated. They were written for an "emulator" called SCUMM so LucasArts could service multiple platforms just by porting one program.
- Minecraft, Blocks That Matter, etc. are emulated. They're written for an "emulator" called the Java VM.
- Games like Unreal are emulated because the UnrealScript they're written in runs inside an "emulator" called the Unreal Engine.

See also the following ports and re-implementations:
- GemRB (Bioware Infinity Engine)
- corsix-th (Theme Hospital)
, Exult (Ultima 7)
- Arx Libertatis (Port based on the source released for the Arx Fatalis engine)
- Vavoom/PrBoom/Doom Legacy/ZDoom/etc. (Modern ports of the source released for DOOM's Build engine)
, OpenTTD (now available with from-scratch graphics and sound so the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe data files are optional)
- etc.

Search up a tool called innoextract. It'll unpack GOG installers on Linux as if they were zip files.

I own every Humble Bundle that is usable on Linux (none of the Android-only Humble Mobile Bundles) and wasn't a Steam-requiring, mis-labeled Humble Weekly Sale (THQ Bundle, Jumbo Bundle, etc.). Many of the games offer only a single zip or binary installer containing a 32-bit build of the game.

I'm fine with that as long as I can get it to work. (Yes, some of them are iffy... but NightSky HD was the only one I had to give up on and play in Wine.)

My mistake. I thought it was some ugly trick with an emulator layer as CIDER is for example to run Windows-only games on OS X.

But many (~50%) are supported by a multitude of packages...up to 6 packages (Darwinia, Botanicula, Lone Survivor etc), where in Mac and Win one package is fine.
Also I was greeted by "2 packages updated since your last visit" (windows) vs "5 packages updated since your last visit" (linux) -> 150% more, despite that I have ~20% less linux than windows games. Support burden...

Following your argumentation that reimplementing a API/ABI is not emulation and the not unusual experience that WINE games run often fine where "native" ports struggle, WINE should be maybe [url=http://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/jwhite/2012/06/05/whining-about-wine]accepted as stable, working and unified gaming solution for the problematic linux ecosystem. As it was also proposed by John Carmack.