I'd rather they gave it the boot.

Just the client or also the infrastructure to support the easy steam ports?

Given how badly the latter has messed up 5 years worth of offline installers, hopefully both...

I'd rather they fix the problem personally. A 20 second delay on otherwise working games strikes me as sloppy execution.

Edit:
I've been very impressed with the catalog of games GOG has been able to bring to us recent years.

As others have stated, it's relatively easy to switch between Steam and GOG installations... but... the fact that GOG Galaxy doesn't default to a GOG installation has always seemed funny.

IMO Galaxy was a good idea with mediocre (to poor) implementation. And sadly as Galaxy has aged -- from my perspective -- it's gotten worse. I now almost solely use Galaxy to download offline installers... and will almost certainly revert to v1.2 when I find the time.

I'm all for GOG improving the offline installer, and they should update them to decrease the start up time.

But the games still work fine, and it's not affecting all installers. To say they messed up five years of the offline installer is stretching it. When AB2012 stated, it doesn't affect all games. I can confirm that some games I have from GOG/Steam have the same start-up time.

Mad Max that was released on around 2021 on GOG, has same start time on both platforms.

Wait, how is it detrimental to DRM free distribution? The offline installers still exist, they aren't magically stopped by Galaxy existing. Hell, sad as it is, the large majority of t he PC customer base demands an all-in-one easy launcher to access. It's better to serve those clients and have the offline launchers as an option from then totally deny Galaxy from scratch.
Honestly that's not a bad strategy. Be cautious when others are greedy right? Large scores of companies, including steam, are pushing changes on mass and integration of a bunch of new experimental tech which is all failing(especially AI and AI moderation) so staying calm and keeping things as they all in a turbulent field seems the right way to go

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singleplayer_games_with_drm/post1

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/it_seems_like_gog_is_unable_to_retain_even_their_long_supporting_developers_now/post186

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/a_while_ago_i_wrote_to_dan_adelman_axiom_verge_and_asked_why_he_didnt_release_it_gog/post24

I kind of shuddered when I heard the term "Steam port", but I guess that's an accurate term nowadays.

But that does mean that games today are developed not "for PC", but rather "for Steam", right?

I guess GOG will have to find a way to make "easy Steam ports" a possibility for their business clients, making GOG games inherently derivative. It's absurd.

This is not what I saw happening in my decades of video games.

Players were against so-called "launchers" (actually DRM systems with a poor disguise) since their first introduction. Stores then stopped selling games without going through these mandatory third-party systems, and they got sneakily introduced even to CD/DVD. Of course it’s easy for them to pretend players are OK with these DRM systems, when they first ensured they are the only way to keep buying video games.

We only then got a new generation of players who never knew the pre-DRM video games landscape, many of them persuaded that video games can not exist without DRMed distribution (outside of illegal redistribution). Everything has been done since then to trick them into being highly reliant on these DRM systems, using things like cloud saves or achievements to keep them trapped.

You are right that it's not a bad strategy for GOG to cease wasting further money pushing the "all of your games in one place" idea, which they spent several years heavily pushing with Galaxy 2.0.

That was always a very bad idea, and many GOG customers, including myself, told GOG so many times, on this board, during all of those years, starting right when GOG first started embracing that horrible business strategy.

But your post makes it sound like GOG had a "good strategy" right off the bat. Except the reality is that no, they didn't really.

On the contrary: GOG abandoned their very bad Galaxy 2.0 "all of your games in one place" strategy only after they had already heavily wasted massive amounts of time, energy, and resources into pushing Galaxy 2.0 as hard as they possibly could, over the course of years.

So, in other words, it's not like, as your comment is implying, that GOG had the wisdom to see the good strategy right away, and never try to be greedy, and then went they went with that good & greed-less strategy by default.

No, that is not at all what happened. Rather, what really happened is: GOG eventually, after a very long time, stopped being in denial about the very obvious fact that their Galaxy 2.0 "all of your games in one place" idea was a massive flop, and then they eventually, finally realized that they have to stop throwing good money after bad, by way of not wasting any more major amounts of GOG's time and resources and money on Galaxy 2.0 (which they had been doing for a very long time, even though many/most of GOG's customers were always telling them that it's a very bad idea).

I want the downloader back. I HATE galaxy 2.0 !!