I' m done.
I' ve been installing and moving drives of a few games lately and my God, Galaxy is definitely the worst library out there, and I say that while I am using Epic, which says a LOT.

Why using Galaxy ? To be honest, I don' t even know. At first, the big connected library with the big pictures, I liked that. But in the end that's the only pros it gives you and it is NOT WORTH the hassle of doing simple things like, I don' t know.. INSTALLING A GAME !!

- Lowest bandwidth of any library I use
-Random lost of bandwitch at various moment of the DL. I would NEVER try to download a huge package like Mass effect legendary on GOG, because it would take me DAYS to get it through.
- Installation don' t start, stuck on infinite loop in DL tab
- Installation don' t start, stuck in infinite loop on the game page after pressing " install"
- Moving games now, there is no dedicated option for it. It's ok, we are pcers, we can handle it. BUT THE APP IS CLEARLY NOT MADE TO HANDLE THIS, leading to not aknoledging the new drive and reinstalling on the old one from scratch, or it want to uninstall, but then it won't start the reinstall on the new drive, get stuck in a loop, and so on and so on

This app is a huge pile of trash. I started my online gaming experience with gog years ago, because they had the games I wanted and I they allowed bancontact pay, as I was too young for a credit card. But now, looking at it, why would I still buy anything on GOG, while every single other provider have a way better rounded systems.
This is unacceptable, and after the cyberpunk case, you should seriously land a hand to your public !

Never really had any of these problems.

Also Galaxy is best used as a downloader for offline installers, unless the game is frequently patched or you really love achievements.

The hassle of downloading it would be the same, first, then I suppose I should full my drives twice as fast by keeping those installers so that I don' t have to DL via galaxy anymore ? is that a solution ?
Galaxy is unstable. It just randomly stop working properly, and it has to change. On small DL it's harder to notice it but as soon as you aim to DL a game that is above gb, you have 1/2 cahnce that it don' t work.

ANd the drive moving thing. Man, yesterday I was moving Trudograd, and the app just... refused, litteraly, to read the moved files and started to re-DL everything. The DL stopped FOUR times, on a 10gb DL. Its crazy.

And I mean, if it was not working at all, I would say ok, shit company, shit app, i don't care.

But when the app work it work very well, but this inconsistency is just unbearable at times

Sounds like you had a really shitty day.

Galaxy always had trouble with flaky network adapters and slow connections, and it used to be even worse. I got 100MBit internet now, so I don't care (anymore), since the effect is mostly gone. But when I was stuck with 11Mbit and a higher lost-package count, Galaxy regularly came to a screeching halt, failed entirely, or slumped along at 100kbyte/second, even though ANY other download manager on my computer was doing fine with the same download. So, I feel you.

The old "offline downloader" didn't have these problems, and I was using ye good old download manager for years until our house got connected to fiber.

So, unfortunately, all I can offer is the advice to avoid Galaxy on slow connections, and perhaps a cup of coffee?

I have hundreds of games here, have never used Galaxy and never had any problems. A lot of stuff you're complaining about, eg, "the client keeps forcing a redownload & reinstall to another drive" are Galaxy-only problems that don't apply to offline installers where you can pick & choose where you want each game installed, and most already installed games simply don't care if their folders are moved to another drive post install due to not needing a secondary bunch of metadata for external "management". Only a very few games will store their install location to the registry for reasons other than Galaxy metadata. Simple answer - if you find Galaxy frustrating, just uninstall it.

In fact, if you have say 500x games installed under C:\Games\... with proper direct shortcuts and you want to change the lot to D:\Games\... it's as simple as moving the folder contents, then running a utility called Shortcuts Search And Replace that will batch replace hundreds of Windows shortcuts to the new location all at once complete with correcting working dir and icon targets.

As for "I suppose I should full my drives twice as fast by keeping those installers so that I don' t have to DL via galaxy anymore?", I think you'll find the whole point is to put them onto a backup / external drive so you don't need to keep redownloading on every future replay (which would certainly solve your slow download speeds in addition to not using any more space on your internal drives).

Uh, gog.com is all about video games being 100% Digital Rights Management (DRM) free, GoG Galaxy is 50% Digital Rights Management (DRM) I say.

I will agree with OP, that Galaxy--even though not required--is a convenience option.
A "convenience option" should be "convenient".

Rather than adding more sales options and store integration, the basic stability and performance issues should be addressed, as well as simple features like relocating an installation folder.

That said, we are unlikely to get any of that, as the managers calling the shots on which features get implemented in the Galaxy client are most certainly not Galaxy users themselves.

That said, one way to relocate games without having to change anything in Galaxy and without triggering a re-download either, is to create a symlink. Unfortunately, Windows hides that feature, and you have to do it on the command line. It is so damn easy, in fact, that I do not understand why Galaxy has no button for it.

Either way, the command is:

mklink /d link-folder-name \Target\Folder\Path

For example, if GOG installed the game to C:\Program Files\GOG\Games\Abc, you then moved it to D:\Games\Def, and finally wish to redirect Galaxy to the new folder, you open cmd.exe and enter:

- C:
- cd "Program Files\GOG\Games\"
- mklink /d Abc D:\Games\Def

Personally, I found it more convenient, however, to create a symbolic link to Galaxy's install and/or download directory, keeping the game where Galaxy installed it. So, in the above example, I would have instead created a symbolic like named "Games" on drive "D" pointing to "C:\Program Files\GOG\Games".

.. grab a brush and put a little makeup. You wanted to! :P

Putting together a good client/surveillance platform these days is hard. You can avoid its issues and all the hassle simply by not using it and sticking to the offline installers. Does that introduce a bit of an upgrade hassle when patches are issued? Sure... guess what I'm saying is: "pick your poison". *In an Amish voice*: This is the home of DRM-free, son. Not what is used to be, sure... some partial-DRM folk have moved in, but we're still mostly good DRM-free people here, living the DRM-free life.

That coffee healed my soul thanks Knowing myself, This is a very good piece of advice I will sit on until galaxy bring me to near smashing m yscreen, then I will go back to this forum by typing a rant against galaxy, find it again, learn how to do it and stick to it for the rest of my life, lmao. THanks for the advice

Yeah, I forgot also why I love gog, the community is genuinely wholesome. But let me tell you that, ubisoft connect installed the whole Far cry compendium (1-6) for me, just by letting it run over a day of work, at 3.6mb/s. The devil can be persuasive.

Anyway thanks for the replies. I may have gotten out of my mind a little bit. I hate installs and uninstalls sessions in general cuz I don' t have much free time, and with galaxy it can get even more tedious.

Bless you all

For DRM free installers.
Seriously. I see no other reason to choose GOG over Steam. But DRM free is a big enough differentiator for games I expect I'd like to pick up again in several years' time.

If you don't care about DRM, choose Steam (or Xbox/Windows Store).

While I don't like Galaxy and thus don't use it, you are probably experiencing server issues due to the current sale.