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tonyzet: No offense guys, but who had the bright idea to name the installation folder under the /opt directory "GOG Games"; You could have chosen something like "GOG_Games" or "GOGgames", etc.
I'd prefer lowercase version like gog_games, it is more conventional, I'd say.

However the only issue with white-spaces I can think of is scripts written without keeping proper screening in mind. It's not very probable situation with gaming, I recon.
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Rabcor: That is bullshit, that is so much bullshit that I will not touch GoG until this policy changes, no refunds for people who aren't using your chosen distributions? Give me a fucking break! [...]
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.
It seems quiet easy for Rabcor to troll you.

Don't feed the troll.
I actually kind of respect how Rabcor and JMich managed to keep it so "polite", usually this would have turned into a flame war after the second post.
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Tolya: --
Most games* not some games. Most old games are 32 bit after all. I think most rage like my own back there could be avoided if a link to this page was added for explanation of why you cannot offer refunds for other distributions (or a brief explanation that your 30 day refund ties in directly to official support) after reading that I understood why already.

Like I said I'm still bummed over it, but Linux is growing in popularity, and perhaps some day a year or two from now things can be better and most distributions can be supported. At least that is my hope for now, I may in the end use GOG on Linux after all. We'll see about Witcher 3 on Linux and such.

There are also a handful of games on Steam that have a Linux version but do not offer it on there ( is a favorite example for me, I would love few things more than to play that game on Linux, Tribes 2 is in a similar situation but it's not on steam) I hope you can get some of these up and running on GOG where Steam has failed us! :) (Although right now you have a lot of games that work on linux but are not selling the linux version, theres also the matter of [url=http://www.gog.com/mix/games_using_dosbox]all your dosbox games, dosbox works on linux. I want to buy earthworm jim and lands of lore, rayman forever, star control, wing commander series, wizardry 1-7(and 8) and all that fancy stuff)

Like I said before, releasing and supporting Wine wrapped games is slightly risky but still something I admire, and I know ther eis a mountain of epic games that run wonderfully on Wine without much trouble (Wizardry 8, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars Jedi Knight 2, Baldurs Gate 1/2, Hitman (blood money and older), Overlord, Tomb raider series, Rune (if you can't get the native version), Beyond Good & Evil to name a few)

You may also want to be aware of the d3dstream patches for wine which can enormously boost game performance when applied. This might be useful since you have the benefit of being able to redistribute your own version of wine

(GOG Wine and GOG Runtimes shipping with GOG Galaxy? This would sound good to me in the near future, and it's a lot more clean than releasing each wine wrapped game with it's own version of Wine, usually you don't need to and since wine by itself can be something around 600MB, it would save our hard drive space)

I agree however with former commenters that GOG should not be installed in /opt and it should be named something in one string, spaces in file/directory names are not very terminal friendly. I personally would have wanted to see it installed somewhere like "/usr/share/gog_games" or if you want an auto update feature that does not rely on package managers or require root access, "$HOME/.gog_games/" would have been fine too)

Your just starting now, I will like I said before not be buying anything now on this sale, the only thing I'm interested in on it anyways is Flatout 2 then maybe off sale theres duke nukem 3D. But you have a lot of games I would buy here, so I will just be keeping an eye on GOG for linux until it looks more attractive for me, make sure to write it out to somewhere whenever you do a sizable update for gog on linux so that I can read up about it on GOL/Phoronix when they cover it :)
Hey, I see several GOGers responded to thread and no one answered about my question about support forum. Never mind. Then I'll just post on the general forum. But I'm not sure how much non-linux users would appreciate the post. So, you'll be to blame for me boring them to death. :)
My topic is here: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/gogcom_linux_and_unsupported_distributions_an_experience. Feel free to peek in. :)
Post edited July 25, 2014 by astropup
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There is one thing I would like to point out for maintaining compatibility with unsupported distros and that is a program which both Ubuntu and Mint currently use. Pulseaudio.

Most people have absolutely nothing to do with Pulseaudio the only thing it's actually good for for average users is that it has built in support for auto-configuring upmixing for surround sound setups, this is however not something plain old alsa can't do, it's just that nobody bothered to make a front end for doing it in alsa yet (This actually bothers me greatly so I've been thinking about doing that myself)

But what I'm trying to say is that I've had problems running some games that only officially support Ubuntu as some of them rely on pulseaudio and are coded to work with pulseaudio probably because the developer might not have even known that pulseaudio is only a layer of messy stuff pasted on top of ALSA which is the real sound architecture on Linux (I.e. pulse is not a standard, it's just something ubuntu chose to use by default), most people who are not running bloated mainstream distros like Ubuntu are going to avoid using pulseaudio, for me for example pulse was nothing but unneeded trouble(Messy audio mixer controls and sound latency were the worst but not my only problems, there were also some hardware detection issues on it as hardware needed to be manually configured to an extent for pulse whereas it did not for ALSA) on Gentoo and Arch installations, I was way better off without it. There is only one application I know of however that went as far as to only support pulseaudio (i.e. not support users who just use ALSA) which is Skype 4.3 but I have noticed a couple of games that only support surround sound via pulseaudio. I think it is very important to maintain compatibility with base ALSA regardless of whether an application is based around having pulseaudio installed or not (as applications built to run well on ALSA, will run just as well on Pulse as pulse is backwards compatible with it, but applications built around Pulse will not run too well on ALSA)

From what I can see, pulseaudio's main function is to stream audio between computers over the net, which is the reason why it of course does not only work on linux (it exists for windows too) this can be nice to for example share a speaker set accross computers, but if you do not need this or another one of it's specialized features I think people should really not be using pulse.

Ubuntu seems to use pulse in an attempt to mimic apple's CoreAudio approach, because Ubuntu after all tries to be a lot like OS X, it is basically mostly an aesthetics thing to them, which is fine as it suits their purposes.

But back in the day using ALSA alone was a bit troublesome since you could run into problems with getting your device locked down to one sound source (so you could only play one sound at a time) Dmixing solved this already though, this is probably why Ubuntu wasn't using plain alsa to begin with (it was a pain to deal with a couple of years back, and ubuntu didn't exactly spawn yesterday)

Pulseaudio/Alsa support ties in with both Dosbox and Wine, in Wine you can configure the sound with winecfg (just make sure winecfg is easily accessible to users for wine wrapped games for troubleshooting sound and other issues) with Dosbox I do not know how it works, I have never tried with that one.
Post edited July 25, 2014 by Rabcor
Hello GOG Linux Users !

I created a new topic providing a solution to this problem:
http://www.gog.com/support/support_view/i_cant_install_any_games_using_the_deb_installer

It can be found here:

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/linux_how_to_move_gog_game_folder_without_breaking_deb_installer_support
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Klumpen0815: Last year this time I argued with GoG-Staff about supporting Linux and they refused it for silly reasons but I think I just found one of those in reality: People bitching around about not supporting their distro properly out of dozens of other distros - like you. No offense intended.
This. At this point GOG staff could say "We told you so.". It is as if their silly fears actually came true.

I don't consider this different from GOG not necessarily supporting all existing Windows variants with their games, as long as they state clearly what they support. Like the time I complained to GOG support one game is not working in Windows 8, not realizing that Win8 wasn't even marked as a supported OS for that game. My bad.
Post edited July 26, 2014 by timppu
I have a suggestion.

GOG should consider to create a linux-tools.deb.

However I was not sure if this suggestion fits in this topic, so I created a new one.

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/linux_gog_should_consider_to_create_a_linuxtoolsdeb
I prefer the linux tarballs even though I am using Mint 17. The deb installer works perfect, but I like having my games installed in my /home partition. I do fresh installs every time a new distro upgrade is available, and the deb version would mean the game needs to be reinstalled each time. I sometimes try other distros as well keeping my /home settings intact. I only have to create a launcher icon, and a big thanks to the gog team for supplying a PNG icon for this purpose.
Hello there! Many thanks for rolling out Linux support! I'm a few days late to the party, but it was extremely welcome news. I've always loved GOG's philosophy, and it's great to be able to have some native games on here.

I do have two requests, both to do with the absence of an official GOG downloader client for Linux:

1) Could you post checksums for the downloads, so that we could verify quickly if the download's complete/valid/current?

2) Could you add in the ability to "resume" downloads?

(Both of these came about due to a Firefox crash in the middle of downloading one of the larger Linux titles available - I had to use "tar" to discover that the file wasn't complete, and would have liked to have been able to resume rather than start over again.)

Regardless, many thanks again!

(Oh, and speaking as a Fedora user, IMO your support policy for Linux makes perfect sense, and I'm more than willing to take on the risk of non-working software. As with the recent influx of HIB and Steam over the past few years, I have no doubt that each distro's individual communities will be more than sufficient to smooth over any distro-specific wrinkles which may arise.)
Post edited July 28, 2014 by xolotl
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Rabcor: snip
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Klumpen0815: Oh come on, many of my games on HumbleBundle do not work on my Linux system (mostly due to me having an ATI and no Nvidia card) and I'm not mad. Since SteamOS is based on Debian (just like Ubuntu/Mint) it wouldn't be a problem to support it if they'd have used another builder and support Debian.

If they wouldn't cut support in this direction, there sure would be a lot Windows users claiming a game doesn't work on their fictional Linux distro and get their money back.

We should be thankful for any love for Linux and encourage to go this road further over time.
Last year this time I argued with GoG-Staff about supporting Linux and they refused it for silly reasons but I think I just found one of those in reality: People bitching around about not supporting their distro properly out of dozens of other distros - like you. No offense intended.
People are going to complain about things like that, but so far I don't see much of this griping. Most people realize that if they're not using Ubuntu or Mint that they're not going to be top priority.

If people stop doing things because one person out there will pitch a fit, I'm not really sure what that leaves us to.

In other words, I wouldn't consider that complaint to be validated until and unless there's some major flamewars and other problems break out. A few people that would probably find other reasons to troll really don't count IMHO.
I'm having quite a harsh time trying to install dependencies in order to run Flatout 2 (flat1 works flawlessly)

Is this the proper thread to ask for some help? :P