We're finally able to show our Linux community some love.
That sounds great, and we're super excited, but what does it all mean exactly?

Here are some of the questions you may have before getting started:

Which Linux distributions do you support?
We test and support our games on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Mint 17 LTS.

Are you planning to add official support for more Linux distributions?
We promise to always offer support for the most recent LTS release of Ubuntu and Mint.
There are no plans to officially support other Linux distributions at this time, sorry.

Will GOG games work on other distributions anyway?
You're more than welcome to give it a try, but we cannot guarantee that everything will work without a hitch.
That means we won't be able to offer refunds, or support, for technical issues on a Linux distribution other than Ubuntu 14.04 LTS or Mint 17 LTS.

What is Wine? Why do you label games that use it?
Wine is a compatibility layer that implements a Windows environment on Linux machines.

Wine carries some inherent performance and stability disadvantages. We place great importance on testing and building Wine games to make sure they are up to our standards of quality and performance, and we will support and stand by these releases. At the same time we recognise that this may not be an ideal solution for everyone, and that some of our users approach Wine with a healthy bit of scepticism.

We feel that it's your right, as our customer, to be informed about any traces of the Wine wrapper on Linux.

That's the gist of it, but there are still questions left unanswered.
You can find more answers and technical help in our General Linux Troubleshooting FAQ!

I don't know what you are talking about.
Here, have a look at this attached cute Red Panda instead :)

If we get permission to do so, sure :)

I am sorry you feel this way :( Let me tell you that the decision to support only two chosen distributions (the two most popular ones, currently) doesn't come from spite or our bad will towards the community.

It comes from the fact that we have to make sacrifices in order to retain as much "GOG-way" as possible - i.e. user friendliness and a guarantee that a game you paid money for actually works. In order to do that we had to select an environment that is not only friendly for the users, but also friendly to us. Right now, supporting games on Arch Linux would mean that we would not only have to support the game itself, but also every instance of an individual system installed and configured by the user.

I understand where you are coming from and I am a big fan of the open source community. However, once you start taking customers' money, you take responsibility for the product you ship. I am a big fan of Arch Linux (because one successful installation of it teaches you a ton about both the hardware and the Linux systems themselves), but right now I can't see how we could guarantee that the games we ship on a system that each users builds for himself work correctly each and every time. And selling people games that we have to refund immediately (because they don't work) is just a good way to aggravate our customers.

The bottom line is this: our "ideal" is that a game we ship works "out-of-the-box" on a supported system. You download our installer, take your computer to the middle of nowhere with no internet connection, you install with a double click and play. We already had to sacrifice a bit of that - some games require i386 libraries on 64-bit systems.

Please send us a Support ticket about FlatOut 2, if you don't mind :)

Because it's made Linux compatible via Wine :)

I don't know as I don't make the Linux builds, perhaps because it's a Wine-wrapped build and maybe installing the game game from a .deb would interfere with Wine on the system. Again, I really don't know all the details :)

Of course it's not, we forgot to change this one line before publishing the article. But it should be corrected now :)
If you see similar mistakes, please let us know!

Correct me if I am wrong but don't our tar.gz archives contain everything you need in order to try and get a given game running on an unsupported distro?

I ask because I am not on the Linux team at GOG, just an average GNU/Linux novice (Mint 17 is my distro at the moment :) )

All Linux games have tarballs.

There is a dependency list in the requirements. ALSA comes with Ubuntu/Mint, so it isn't listed.

Fixed :) Thanks!

If you see a level called "Dosan's Story" in the level selection menu after hitting start, you have the Special Edition version installed :)

Should be fixed now :)