How do you guys get your controllers to work? I've tried so many things from restarting so steam isn't open to ds4windows to having it connected by usb but i can never seem to get my controllers to work for games though gog

It would help if you asked about specific games. Many, if not most, games older than 10 or 15 years old don't support controllers and GOG sells many old games so it would help if you listed specific games and if you listed your specific controller.

I am an avid controller user. I simply will NOT play a game using keyboard and mouse for games using WASD movement and mouse camera control, which is what many/most older games did, for example... Gothic 1 and 2, Morrowind as well as many others. I play all of them with a Logitech controller (F310) and use the included Profiler software to map keyboard keys to controller buttons. New games have built in support for controllers especially the XBOX 360 controller so no mapping necessary.... which is good because the mapping software for that controller isn't included with purchase and requires a separate purchase, or at least it used to.

It gets a little more complicated with DOSBOX games as I think sometimes that requires some tweaking of the DOSBOX software to get them to at least get the input from a USB controller IIRC.

Anyway I feel your pain about not getting a controller to work and hope it gets resolved. There is nothing specific about GOG games that prevents them from working.... although I have never used Galaxy and wonder if that may be an issue. Good luck with finding a solution.

EDIT: oops, sorry I see the title does list pro controller. which I've never heard of lol.

it's mainly new games like shantae and the pirates curse and the neptunia rebirth games. I've tried both a switch pro controller and a ps4 controller

I'm assuming you're using a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller?
There is this post that you might find helpful:

https://www.gog.com/forum/the_witcher_3_wild_hunt/do_switch_pro_controller_work_with_gog/post5

It mentions The Witcher 3, but according to some other posts/comments on that issue, using the "add a non-Steam game to my library" workaround seems to work for many (all?) GOG games in general.

Apart from that, there's also this posted (from the same thread, though I've seen that program mentioned in several other threads):

https://github.com/Davidobot/BetterJoy

Quote from github:
"Allows the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, Joycons and SNES controller to be used with CEMU, Citra, Dolphin, Yuzu and as generic XInput."

yeah i did the add non steam game work around lol i'll look into doing those other two later