The following message, after the line of ---s below, is an exact copy/paste of a message to support. I am posting it here as an open letter to the company, in the hope that other users will agree with what I'm saying, and perhaps some will repost it, or something similar, in their own contacts with GOG support staff.

I understand and respect that at present, there are a lot of problems on everyone's plate. I don't expect GOG support to put themselves in harm's way to address these concerns, but the very fact of this current situation making support a more difficult service to provide means that such actions as launching this new client should not have been done during the situation. And this is even if the current feedback about 2.0 had been consistently favourable and not questioning it as being unfit for full launch once this was announced. But here, read this, and feel free to comment in support, disagreement, or whatever else. Also feel free to copy and edit as you see fit for use in your own communications with GOG if you consider it to be worthwhile. My experiences with GOG support have been consistently positive in the past, so I have good reason to expect that my (admittedly forceful) approach to these concerns will taken as the constructive criticism it is intended to be.

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The new Galaxy 2.0 colour scheme is great as far as I'm concerned. The layout is decent. BUT core functionality and UI controls are notably absent and there are major problems in several areas because of this. It's blatantly not ready for full launch, and Galaxy 1.2 needs to be more reliably accessible to users who want a stable and polished game launcher to use. Of particular note are the following problems, which really should have been resolved long before pushing this update onto the userbase:

-There is no standard view with a game list in the sidebar. The only workarounds are to keep clicking "back" after opening each game you want to look at in the library, or to manually add every single game into the sidebar and to deal with the unwanted extra options in the sidebar with the list of games mixed into it and to keep adding each game individually into the sidebar with every new purchase. Neither of these is a properly functional workaround, let alone an acceptable alternative to having a consistently-accessible sidebar list of games and only games as a viewing option.

-The viewing options don't persist across sessions. If you set the client to sort games by "last played", then exit, when relaunching the app, it reverts to the default "sort by title" view instead. There is no way to fix this behaviour at present, and these settings NEED to save across multiple sessions for this UI to feel functional and reliable.

-Some sorting options present in 1.2 appear to be absent in 2.0, including sorting by purchase date. There is no good reason for this to be missing from the new client when it was present before.

-Options for customising the colour scheme, at least as far as having "light", "dark" and "high contrast" options, are very notable by their absence. This is a highly-problematic feature to be missing for many users. Personally, I like the new colour scheme, but this is not an acceptable feature to be missing when updating your launcher. Particularly when there was feedback during beta about the new design being difficult for many users to navigate because of the colour scheme. An option to use a higher-contrast scheme needs to be easily accessible, as does a light mode for users who find it more comfortable.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of features that Galaxy 2.0 would benefit significantly from, but at this stage, I'm pretty sure these are the key "must have" basics which will be necessary for 2.0 to be polished enough to be in everyone's hands as it is now. A significant reason I stopped using Steam recently was the fact that a too-short beta test of a new interface led to the launch of an unpolished broken mess of a new client app. In their case, the software is an active health hazard for users, so it's far more of a failure than yours, but don't do what they did and keep your mistake live for 6 months in spite of knowing it's a problem. It only takes the most cursory of glances into the Galaxy 2.0 forums to see that it's not ready for launch yet.

Word!

v2.0 BETA is an OCD's absolute nightmare. I just can't.
But even worse, I've seen people post here, explaining how they literally can't, because their color blindness literally renders important parts of the UI pretty much invisible to them.

Signal boosted in my topic.

If you, dear reader, want to prevent the update from ever occurring, or roll back after it got you - here's a dedicated topic to explain how to do that (shameful self-plug):

HOW TO Keep Galaxy v1.2 client and avoid the forced v2.0 BETA update

I'll share a link to a post of mine here as well.

Yep.

The only reason I moved from downloading the installers to Galaxy 1.2 is because the layout and functionality of Galaxy 1.2 is really good.

I'm happy to see new functionality, new look options etc - as long as the original functionality and layout is expanded upon - not removed.

Galaxy 1.2 works really, really well. I hope they implement it into 2.0....

Thanks for the replies! And just since it's relevant here - I'm still using 2.0 in spite of my misgivings about it. It's very deeply flawed but I don't think it's impossible to fix. It NEEDS basic functionality that's missing, most of which was present in 1.2, though. It's very clear it's still in beta, and the core problem it has is quite simply that it IS beta but NOT being treated as such. Users who are NOT opted into beta testing are having it forced on us without being given a choice, and having to use obnoxiously multi-layered and unsupported workarounds to get back and maintain the most recent stable build of the software.

I reverted to the original, hopefully all is stable going forward.
The new 2.0 made all of my games that ran with DOSBOX unplayable, when you tried to play them nothing would happen, I would have to uninstall them and install again. I really don't feel like going back and installing all of these games again. I have literally hundreds in my library.
The real fun part of this was in reverting back to the original, all of my game settings got reset to default including mods and I had to reinstall all of those, complete cluster eff

Who was the yahoo that thought this was ready for launch? I shouldn't have clicked yes I suppose there was a reason why I wasn't using this before, guess I forgot.
A big issue also is there doesn't seem to be any way to go straight to the forum of the game you have selected.

I took some steps and now have to make sure my games do not auto update and added a command line to the shortcut not to update, as well as deleted some of the update files.

Instead of just deleting the updater, just create a new .txt file somewhere [edit because my old brain forgot to type that part: rename it as GalaxyUpdater.exe] , replace the original GalaxyUpdater.exe (in \Galaxy\redists\) with it, and set it as read only to protect it

We did that with skype's mandatory updates in the old days, worked fine

I did this, what will this do, prevent the application from downloading the updater and running again?

The read-only marking ? Yep, or at least that's what it did for years for my fake skype.exe in the /temp/ directory with windows XP and 7, so I don't see why it would do otherwise nowdays

Yes that's what I did, aren't you supposed to make sure the file is named GalaxyUpdater and saved as an .exe file too
Originally I just deleted it, but restored it from the recycle bin with your advice and also did what I said above

Sorry, yes, create a new .txt file, rename it as GalaxyUpdater.exe, and replace the original GalaxyUpdater.exe with it. (I should have reread myself)

Seems like a good idea also some people might not know how to do this correctly.
Anyhoo I hope there's no more issues.

I can't remember if the update was forced on me, I just remember a window popping up and I think it gave me an option. Did it get forced? I wasn't really paying attention at the time.
I'm hearing a lot of people saying that it just automatically updated without their approval

The 2 options you got were, basically 1/ update now and 2/ update next time galaxy is started. Either way, refusing the update was not an option (at least until now)

I see nothing on the forums, at least.
From twitter @GOGcom there's a retweet from @GOGGalaxy... https://twitter.com/GOGGalaxy/status/1255440527723507713

They don't seem to care as long as they can shove it down your throat