Hey there,

Wondering if I should install GOG un my Macbook, I have fews questions if you don't mind

1 - Does GOG needs to be open when playing GOG Games ?
2 - Does GOG runs a background process when playing GOG Games?
3 - Would it launch itself if new updates are available ?
4 - If I ever uninstall GOG would it affect my GOG Games ?

Honestly I'm really tired of Steam, such a bloated buggy P.O.S specially on mac, If GOG is a slim easy to use updater I want to give it a try but.. as I said I'm tired of unnecessarily bloated "game launchers"

Thanks in advance

1. No, Galaxy does not have to be running, only if you want achievements and other Galaxy related things.
2. Galaxy keeps running in the background if you let it in order to make achievements and such work.
3. Galaxy will only launch when A) you launch it manually or B) it's set to launch on startup.
4. I'm not sure what happens to games installed via Galaxy if you uninstall Galaxy but I don't think it should uninstall the games unless you've installed them in the Galaxy folder which you shouldn't do.

And Galaxy is much, much worse than.. well any other client on the market.
Downloading the patches manually would be the smallest footprint.

No for the most part. Some games require it for multiplayer and achievements. If you launch the client, yes. Otherwise, no. Keep in mind, though, that the client is set by default to launch at startup. No. You'll need to manually launch the client if you want updates. No, but as I said above, you won't be able to play multiplayer or gain achievements on some games. If you think that Steam's client is bad, then I doubt you'll like the Galaxy client.

If there is an update for it it will update itself on launch. No, if you uninstall Galaxy the installed games will remain; also if you install Galaxy after having installed games manually they will be detected by it, you won't need to reinstall them using Galaxy.

thanks all for your replies

All GOG games can be installed and run without the Galaxy client which is always optional. Some games have optional functionality that uses Galaxy services to implement such as multiplayer and achievements as others have mentioned, but the games will still work without Galaxy if you do not care about the optional features.

You can download your games either via GOG Downloader, or via web browser if you prefer not to use the Galaxy client.

One more thing worth noting is that you can install games manually via the standalone installers and most of them will be detected and show up in Galaxy automatically if you choose to use it, quite a few game installers have not yet been updated to be Galaxy aware and those games need to be manually imported into Galaxy. Thought I'd mention that as it can be confusing. :)

Also, remember that Galaxy is still beta, so it could have some bugs.
I'm frankly not touching it, until a stable version will come out..

From Mac user to Mac user: just avoid it. Galaxy is not that much better than Steam. Galaxy is even more unorthodox than Steam on OS X the way in which it is installed (obscure installer with admin permissions), where it is installed (in /Users/Shared, where it really shouldn’t be) and how it handles game installations, in particular Gatekeeper (which it completely circumvents, giving you no protection). There is really little benefit to using Galaxy unless you want the social features. Installing and updating games is easier on OS X than Windows anyway and Galaxy doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t do yourself. Save yourself the 180+ MB of space and frequent updates of 100+ MB and just do it yourself.

Probably a safe bet. I've been telling friends to avoid it unless they're forgiving of bugs and instability and ok with beta testing and filing bug reports and participating in forums to discuss problems. A few of them installed it anyway and have used it a few times to install a game but don't have it start at OS startup or run it normally, preferring to just download the installers manually instead. I think those that want a stable fully featured client are smart to wait it out though, but I think they may be waiting for another year or two until it gets to that point perhaps as it seems there is a long way to go on various features/functionality yet. The basics work ok for the most part though minus the current nasty bug that is hitting us with inability to download stuff. :)