I can agree that this is a first barrier for adoption, true. But is not a critical barrier or the fundamental reason why linux has not taken off up to now as desktop OS. People are curious and also willing to test new things (but not infinite adaptive, which seems the underlying requirement for linux as desktop OS).

(too lazy to quote your previous post, you know what you told)

but I will requote this
"remains user resistance to their habits, and I've perfect example at home with my family : Office 2003 and OpenOffice/LibreOffice are 95 to don't say 99% similar for a casual use. "

Casual, do you know what is it? She's not an MSO expert! Short keys? She isn't even able to do ctrl + c/ctrl + v for a copy & paste! So scripts and more complicated short keys? Nah, she use right click and menus like more than 90% of peoples, and looking at this it's exactly the same for a very basic use.

And that's exactly it for most of the usages : for a basic use it will be the same whatever they use.
Walled garden?
1/ Even a proprietary repository will benefit from the dependency side and will be able to download and install what it needs. You never had a dll, library, C++/.net redistributable package and so on missing on Windows? I had. And it's a pain in the ass to see what's the problem. Meanwhile, on Linux, I install with the repos, and it install what it needs and even alert me if there are conflicts between programs/libs and so on.

Adapt the OS with program? Sure you've to do when the OS is incomplete and offer a bad experience (ie. all what I quoted and my previous post as missing on Windows. You can fix some of these problems with programs, sometimes very ugly fixes (cygwin for example), but not all…and that's the bad way to do it.

Linux have…modularity. You install it if you need it and it fit perfectly.
Windows have…patchwork of different things you've to assemble the best you can do to have something which works a little bit as you need…or not.
See the difference? Think to KDE/Gnome and all of what they offer for example. A very big ecosystem for KDE too.

And for another times, YES preinstallation IS a problem. Not the only one as I already said, but it IS a problem.

This is disgusting. Instead of discussing how a case could be made for GoG to bring linux support (and assure them that there's no need to support the Rasp. Pi) there's about 50+ pages of dumb flame wars.

Good job guys. Keep feeding the trolls, they gotta eat too, right?

Trying to get the debate going forward, but have the impress to talk to a dull or a wall as some remarks I already did to him couples of pages ago are not took on board.

About GoG and Linux, I don't really know about gameswhich are not already available on Linux as if the developer/editor don't want it on this OS, GoG can't do a lot except asking them, but they don't weight on a lot I think.

Where I see no issues and still don't understand they don't provide it, it's for the high number of games already available on Linux elsewhere and already sold here : VVVVVV, Dust, Incredipede, Super Hexagon, Megabyte Punch among lots of others…

All that could be said to GOG was already said I think. But they decided not to answer anything and remained silent since their last major answer to GoL. Obviously they aren't interested in giving us any status updates, I'm not even sure whether they monitor this thread or not anymore.

You mix up "functional" equality with "user experience" equality.
While I can agree that functional (on simple to medium level) OO is functional comparable to MS office, on user experience it seems to be too different (shown by your mother).
Another example is GIMP which is functional a fine software, but it also has the most horrible UX (taken out software which has bad functionality too).

As there is common misunderstanding here I will answer in detail: dependency hell was solved for windows with win2000 and private DLLs (meaning, apps bringing their own set of DLLs). This works as windows always prefer DLLs in the local directory before system libraries.This works fine and SOLVES dependency hell once and for all...by clear separation between apps and system. Also, the overhead is negligible (as DLLs are in moderns apps only a very small part). In linux, on the other hand, there is no concept of local private libraries, applications use always system libs before local one (ignoring ugly hacks like LD_LIBRARYPATH which redirects ALL libs). Which means, in linux everything is in sync and permanent under the risk that on app pulled the wrong version and destabilized the complete system, therefore I call this system (hopefully) "managed dependency hell".

This means every application needs to be synchronized with an distro and it's libs. If I want to provide packages and deploy the app for linux, this results in support pain and many packages. Take a look at humble library, for linux you need 10 packages where windows is fine with one. Distro-agnostic packaging is a problem. Bundle system (like Autopackage) trying to solve that (bundles are common under windows and MacOS), but facing major resistance by the distros.

I tend to disagree. Windows and MacOS are complete OSes and have a significant bigger app ecosystem even if I take the whole distro ecosystem as comparison. Meaning the choice and freedom for users is bigger with the proprietary systems. I stand my point, the fragmentation among the distros reduces choice and freedom for the users as it prevents the arrival of a stable platform ISVs and distributors (like GOG) would like to use.

Or as Ingo Molnar called it: "The basic failure of the free Linux desktop is that it's, perversely, not free enough."

Easy, fix the linux ecosystem (e.g. make it as easy supportable as MacOS) and GOG would jump on board in a minute.
(Pretending everything is fine and GOG is the one who has to adapt is not helping at all.)

shaddim: Stop these rants please. GOG's behavior has nothing to do with any ecosystems. If anything it shows their lack of resources or agility in addressing this issue. Or may be simply lack of interest. Spending years on coming up with support approach starts looking comical already (reminds me of the vaporware story of Duke Nukem Forever).

Sorry no rant. They explicitly stated that they decided to not support linux because of the fragmented nature and the unpredictable support burden, which is clearly a characteristic of the current linux ecosystem. (What you said is always true, every problem can be solved with enough ressources at hand , Steam tries this currently... with MANY ressources.)

Have you seriously tried them? I don't compare to last 2007, 2010 and over versions which are very different from the UI point of view but about the 2003 she was used. I used both this one and oOo/LO. For a basic usage, it's really the same at the price exception. Oh, and format incompatibility lots of times ago (thanks to Microsoft to use closed format and don't share informations to allow others to use it. And have bad compatibility with open and documented formats). It even have the luxury to be better on some points like the equation editor. MSO equation editor can only be used with the mouse while oOo/LO's one can be used with mouse AND keyboard with a simplified latex syntax.

These problems still exists. I had one of them…like…couple of months ago in a W7 VM. Missing C++/.net redistributable package I had to manually install and before this, I had to search for it on Internet.

"Which means, in linux everything is in sync and permanent under the risk that on app pulled the wrong version and destabilized the complete system" Nope. Again you don't completely red what I said. Never heard about dependency AND conflict checking with repositories? I did. And it does it very well by giving you warning if something is going to break if you force the update of this or this component.

It stills less integrated and like a patchwork of fixes, while the other one provide an homogeneous set at least for the basic system features, either for basic or power user. The two others only focus on basic users, hence basic functionalities/usages. You want multi-desk? Install a (paid) 3rd party software.
You want a real terminal? Install cygwin, but it still an ugly patch/fix.
A better FS? Ops, you can not, It's only NTFS or FAT32 (even worse) on older Windows., only HFS+ for MacOS. extX, ZFS, ReiserFS, BTRFS and so on? Meh, useless.
Unicode and UTF-8? Meh, useless, deal with your old ISO-8859-1
A package manager to manage updates and softs from a single place? Ok. Use our latest OS (erk, W8 UI…I will come at it later) with our store, pay our tax and accept the limitations we require and the features or licenses we told you can not choose.
[For Windows only] 0-day security hole? Meh, it can wait next patch-thuesday, can it?
You don't like our very new and beautiful tabled-minded UI from our excellent W8? Just close your mouth and deal with it. We choose, you accept. Nice vision, no?


But…everything is fine…
Or…why Humble Bundle is able to give access to these versions, mmh?

The Bard's Tale was updated in 2012 (even for Windows); this is the version being sold digitally so it's effectively a 2012 release.

Read their response. GOG explicitly said they are researching support approach. And it takes them years to research apparently. So either GOG are misleading us, or they want to construct a hyper drive.

The Linux version was updated on November 21, 2013. That's the date of the updated package from the Humble Bundle. And, first Linux release happened earlier in 2013 as well.

I am sorry, but how are you making this claim? For example, here's a post about users varying experiences making HB games work on Arch Linux. Also note that players are troubleshooting themselves, i.e. HB is NOT giving them support, whereas GOG ensures support for every product they sell.

Link: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=169648

Yeah, yeah we know that GOG wants its Linux users to have nothing rather than something.

For the game I used, I never noticed any issues. Btw, Humble Bundle is supposed to provide some support. But I never had to ask them for any, so I don't know what's happening if you ask for it.
However, you've to know that Archlinux community is from guys that like to go deeply into things and have a distro which is always very up to date. That can cause some issues because it's a lot more up to date than other distros.
But they choose it for this reason among others :)