Alm888: Interesting math, even though unsustaned by sources of information. But it can be applied to Mac as well, just replace "1%" with "3%" and the final result with "0.09%". But somehow Mac is viable OS, and Linux is not. :(
IMO, the descision to support or not to support an OS is mostly based on managers' perceprion of OS in question. Mac OS is viewed ar OS for rich, successful people with lots of money and taste for good things, so MacOS is a must. While Linux is just a toy for geeks and those who can not afford Windows license (needless to say all Linux users are potential pirates because they share that wacky "Free OS for Free People" believes), so it is not feasible to support Linux. (Never mind Mac's generally crappy hardware, "Intel in place of video cards", buggy, outdated OpenGL and proprietary Apple-specific Metal™).
There are no in depth statistics anyone can pull up to give a complete scientific analysis of operating system usage out there, so we have to take what is out there and do some reasonable ballpark estimation based on that. If you look at the number of systems on Steam Stats registered as Mac versus Linux/SteamOS it is one factor to take into account. Another is the number of games available on Steam for Mac versus those available for Linux. These are loose numbers but gaming deployment on Mac versus on Linux is higher, somewhere up to double on Mac or thereabouts. In theory if Linux deployment climbed to match Mac, that would make for a level playing field on those metrics. But there's more to it than that also, as they're officially supporting 2 Linux distributions, which means potentially double the installation and quality assurance testing or more depending on how far they take it. The amount of variance that can and generally does exist on a Linux installation is generally much higher than it will be on a Mac or Windows system, and that can't be ignored either.
I'm rather sure that your comment about Linux users being potential pirates is entirely in jest, but everyone may not realize that. For the record however, if anyone goes to the Humble Bundle website and looks at the price break downs for a given bundle, where it shows bundle purchases per platform (people can choose what platform they are purchasing their game for, for statistical purposes), in every single bundle I've ever viewed the statistics for, Linux contributors consistently have paid more on "beat the average" than both Windows and Linux, which I perceived as Linux users wanting to reward the game companies for being thoughtful enough to make their games available on the Linux platform by paying extra. I don't know of any statistics other than Humble for this, but I'd wager that the wider Linux gaming community would have similar sentiments and even be willing to spend a few bucks extra to get good Linux support (or any at all) if such an option exists (as it does with Humble).
So I don't think there is any problem with regards to Linux users being willing to pay, or even to pay more. I think the problem is that even though Linux gaming is at an awesome and growing awesome state, it still has not reached that "cruise control" speed yet and unfortunately for all of us Linux enthusiasts - it is still niche. It's upper tier niche, and hopefully will cross that threshold to being more mainstream WRT gaming in the next few years, but it's just not there quite yet.
I perhaps naively thought Valve's SteamOS and Steam Machines efforts were going to catapult Linux gaming forward much further than has actually materialized to date so far. I'm glad for what they did accomplish and it did move things forward but we now seem to have hit a new plateau. I'd like to fantasize that Galaxy client would push it forward to that next level, but I have doubts about that too. :)
shmerl: I.e. they aren't dedicated to Linux support of Galaxy yet. Otherwise, if current team isn't enough, they should hire more people. There is no other way about it. There can be a marginal case when they simply can't find anyone to hire. That happens, but I'd say they had quite a long time to find some people. I see many of their engineering positions require relocation to Poland offices. That may be a blocker for them.
Yeah, I completely agree with you on all points of that. It's pure conjecture, but I speculate that it is a very hard sell on a lot of developers around the world to relocate to Poland. If true, then that's a real bummer as they're missing out on perogies out the wazoo, and a bunch of other great things Poland has to offer of course. :) I wonder how big GOG would have to become in order to consider opening offices in other countries such as the US, UK, Germany or elsewhere which could increase the pool they have to work with?
They've had job postings up literally forever, which seem to stay up perpetually. That could mean that they're hiring people and still wanting to hire more, or it could mean they want to hire but are not filling the positions, or even a combination of both perhaps. Even if they are hiring people to work on Galaxy though they're going to most likely allocate them to the projects that are the most important to their business overall, and that might not end up being Linux support for a while.