I know Galaxy 2.0 doesn't have a Linux client, but I would still prefer to use it on SteamOS on the Steam Deck rather than having to install Windows, which right now doesn't have an official way to dual boot anyway.

Has anyone else tried to run Galaxy 2.0 on the Steam Deck or Linux in general, and noticed that the client was using a lot of CPU at all times? Just to put in perspective how much of a difference it makes: I was playing Kingdom Hearts 3 and the device reported 4.5 hours of battery remaining. I then launched an old game, Earthworm Jim 2, via Galaxy and had only under 2 hours left. That is an insane difference, Galaxy is constantly using up CPU resources for no apparent reason

This is a behavior I've also noticed on Windows where it sits at 5 - 10% CPU usage for extended periods of time, I think it takes about 10 minutes to finally settle down and "only" use about 1% of my CPU, but on Linux it's even more broken



I know you can run games without the launcher or using the Heroic Games launcher, but then you don't have multiplayer, play time tracking, or achievements

Yeah, I've just installed Galaxy on my system (Ryzen 5600X, Radeon 6500 XT, OpenSuSE Tumbleweed) so that I could have multiplayer No Man's Sky (which runs pretty much flawlessly under Linux). It's completely maxed out my CPU, 100% usage at maximum clock speed on all cores. Right now it's sitting on the "importing" stage (which it's been doing for a full hour and has only reached 61%) and the UI is extremely unresponsive.

Interestingly enough, the CPU temperature is actually less than it would be in-game despite all cores running at max clock and full usage.

EDIT: and after leaving it overnight, the "importing" stage finished. It was still eating 100% of my CPU. Closing and launching it again makes it take up my entire CPU once more and start importing all over again. This is no good whatsoever, so time to see if the 1.x client does any better.

Well, it didn't behave any better. I tried going back to Galaxy 1.x (see here: https://www.gog.com/forum/general_beta_gog_galaxy_2.0/how_to_keep_galaxy_v12_client_and_avoid_the_forced_v20_beta_update) and that worked.

The 1.x client crashes under Linux, however. To make it work, I had to install the corefonts package using winetricks (which is done fairly easily with the "winetricks corefonts" command in the terminal), though I don't know whether SteamOS has winetricks or whether it includes corefonts by defauit. That particular solution came from https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32342

Another thing I did was to rename the libGLESv2.dll file in the Galaxy installation directory, see https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44985

The 1.x client still uses a lot more CPU than it ought to, but it's "only" 25% as opposed to the 100% that 2.x did. It still works, as I was able to see other players in No Man's Sky when I entered the anomaly space station.

I managed to improve the performance and startup time significantly by getting rid of all the game data I had (there's still some left due to broken integrations, but to get rid of it I had to reinstall the integrations, connect, then disconnect. Galaxy 2.0 is buggy)

It's still not as good as I'd like, but it's a huge improvement.

I found an EVEN BIGGER improvement! In fact, this seems to eliminate unnecessary resource consumption completely.

I don't know why I never thought of this before, but I opened the System Monitor while running a GOG Galaxy game to see if anything fishy is going on. And indeed, there's a process called "winedevice.exe" that constantly consumes over 10% of CPU and is clearly the culprit of the battery drain.

I have no idea what it does. From research "winedevice.exe" has something to do with creating access to drives for windows processes. Such as SD cards or disk drives. But I can't figure out what its purpose is in this case

Anyway, you have to launch a game and then open System Monitor to kill this winedevice.exe process. This doesn't seem to affect the game at all. There are other winedevice.exe processes that spawn but they will consume little to no CPU time. It's only that one sitting at over 10% all the time

It's annoying having to do this on every game launch, but at least there is a workaround. Hope the Heroic Launcher integrates GOG functionality soon

Well, I'm taking it back. This only works as long as you're playing a small game that doesn't need to load or save from/to disk during gameplay. Apparently that process is necessary for that, and while trying to load/save your game will freeze until you resume the process. Which is an extreme hassle, obviously.

Still can't imagine why the heck GOG Galaxy is causing this process to be so demanding of resources

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