It happens with this workflow:
* Log into GOG from within lutris.
* Go through your GOG library, and choose the game to install.
* Ignore the button that would set a cache directory.
* Lutris will download the game and run the installer.
* Lutris will then delete the installer, so if you want to install it again, you need to redownload it.

Linux user here since May 2000. Used Red Hat first, then Mandrake, and finally Slackware. I use Slackware 64-bit, -current (development) version. It's an old school Unix but with the most updated software. For novices, however, I would recommend an Ubuntu flavor among the many available, and the Plasma (KDE) desktop environment. Dual boot. Most of my Windows use is just compatibility and gaming. There's no point in gaming under a virtual machine so it's dual boot for me. Advantages: You can run natively software for both OSes. You can have games for Windows :)

disadvantages: The Windows partition eats your storage space. Sometimes, a Windows update can be nasty and destroy your boot manager setup. Nothing that could not be fixed, though. Advantage: 100 % of your box is dedicated to one (and better) operating system.
Disadvantage: you are seriously limited in your game choices. You cannot run MS Word natively. Cannot comment, don't use Wine. In the past, however, every time I used it, it had some compatibility problems with some apps. However, most people now report that games are great under Wine.

Right now the main reason for myself not using Wine is that it would force me to have a multilib Linux setup (that is, able to run both 32-bit and 64-bit software), and this would be an added complexity. I'd rather limit myself to dual booting. Generally speaking, on these days Linux hardware support is better than Windows. On nVidia GPUs, however, you are forced to use nVidia's binary blob drivers which are in various levels of crappy. Due to this reason I tend to avoid nVidia GPUs (and I like games). I had some artifacts when I used a PC with a nVidia GPU on Linux. However, be advised that these were just annoyances, not showstoppers, and that the PC and the GPU were fairly old. Yes, and I would suggest you use WSL 2. As far as I saw, you can do on WSL 2 anything you could do on a Linux command line with the exception of sound and multimedia, which I'm told is possible but it is a serious pain in the neck to set up. However, WSL2 has all the power of a Linux command line, generally speaking, and it could be a great way to test the waters, at least for the command line part.

I wish you success in your exploration.

[i]• What Linux distro you use the most and why?
[/i]Linux Mint – it's just simple, well-documented, you can easily google answer to every possible question. I use Windows at work and I really think for casual user Linux Mint is much simpler, more stable and secure.

• If you use Linux alongside Windows or other OSs, do you use Virtual Boxes or Dual Boot? Why?
Nope. Dropped Windows years ago and never needed it again.

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of using two OSs in the same PC?
Not sure if any, if you want to have both. Perhaps loading time is longer as there's a need to put system-selection phase in the middle. That's the reason I personally dropped using 2 Linux systems – I liked that solution to make system changing easy and to experiment with different distributions, but now I just keep the only one – Linux Mint.

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of using ONLY Linux (any distro / comparison of distros, if you want to explain)?
No need to pay for Windows. And all the advantages of Linux. I cannot see any reason to keep Windows today – but it's from my personal perspective.

• Does WINE really works well with Windows exclusive games?
It depends. For old classics I think it's much better than modern Windows itself :D but if you play a lot of new/AAA games, I guess it may not be good enough for you.

• Is it true that Linux have compatibility issues with some hardware (GPU, specially)? What's your experience with this?
In my case there's no problem and for most of tasks I think Linux is much better in terms of performance. In case of gaming – I use nVidia drivers and I think they work really well. But, to be honest, I've decided to buy Lenovo+Intel+nVidia laptop to be sure it will work well under Linux. I suppose there still might be some problems with some specific, less supported hardware.

It's much better today, almost all popular hardware works simply out-of-the-box. I have a Brother printer and it works like a charm for me – my wife had always a lot of issues with the printer when using her Windows laptop :D

Good luck with discovering Linux world. The best solution is to just start using it – in my case it just resulted in falling in love :D Privacy, full control, configurable, secure, fast as hell, pretty – Linux is awesome! :)

thats the true way or it is just a galaxy clone :O

I've done some distro hopping. Zorin tends to be one I return to. I also like Mint a lot.
Next I'm trying Salient (as its pretty much geared for gaming and I like how it feels / works). Always dual booted. Usually keep a live USB about as well in case of any issues - for me or others. Had some with things like wifi adaptors in the past - often sorted by a simple system update (ie on mint) but not always the case.
Apparently NVidia gpus can have issues as the drivers arent open sourced. For that reason I went with AMD for my first desktop (built just this year) - partially because I knew I'd want to use linux with as little faffing as possible.

- What Linux distro you use the most and why?

Debian here, it's not as user friendly as some other distros but with some configuration it can be made to be. It's also stable and in my case it allows me to easily create an offline repository so I can add/remove packages without internet.

- Does WINE really works well with Windows exclusive games?

It works very well with many games, it is however limited in which online games you can play due to AntiCheat technologies. See here for a list of how well a game runs: https://www.protondb.com/

- Is it true that Linux have compatibility issues with some hardware (GPU, specially)? What's your experience with this?

With 7 different PC's at home, I haven't encountered any incompatibilities. Everything mostly worked out of the box except a USB Wifi adapter which I had to compile a driver for it. My main system runs an AMD 5800X CPU and RX 6800 GPU, no issues whatsoever.

I use only Ubuntu for now but just because I don't have spare computers to test my ideas (aka "somewhat accidental stress tests"). When I get the chance, I'll be testing other OS's. I use both dual boot and virtual machines (and a Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 10).
Virtual machines are good to me because some times I want to use something that works better in a clean install of an OS, such as testing if a game runs without Steam (in fact, I have both an Ubuntu and a Windows 10 virtual machines).
But having dual boot is also good because:
- driver compatibility is usually better (for example, apparently, how a virtual machine processes graphics is different from how a full Windows install does)
- it tends to be faster (for example, if I want a guest virtual machine running with 8 GB of RAM, I'd need at least 10 GB of RAM in a full Ubuntu install, and 11 in a full Windows install, while a native/full install could use pretty much every byte of RAM)

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is good if a tool works better on Linux but you need to use specifically Windows, or in cases like the one I described in the end of the last reply in this message. The same disadvantage of using pretty much any OS alone: Compatibility.
Some programs only work well on Windows. Some just on Linux. Some just on Mac. Some are exclusive to a specific OS. Some run better in specific OS's, even though they work in multiple ones. Depends. Like any form of emulation, it isn't perfect.
Some programs run right off the bat, some times even better than running directly on Windows.
Some have minor issues, like games that require Japanese locale (in game text may appear with some tweaks, but if the window has option menus, such as File, Options, etc., the texts there tend to appear broken).
Some, well, I still need to figure out if they can be really run on Linux (and I'm not eager to text things like RPG Maker XP games again). I never could confirm that (again, I don't have spare computers), so I only know rumors and mentions from other users. Depends. It would be a learning curve, that's for sure. It'd be interesting to understand at least a bit of how the OS works, such as commands, folder structures, etc., before testing a version of it with the UI stripped from it inside an OS that tries to hide the technical part.
And as far as I know, everything that WSL can run must happen inside the command terminal.
If you try to run anything that requires execution of graphics or opening new windows, such as playing Linux games, you'll just get an error and the program won't open.
Also, running things that modify local files may cause some issues. In fact, that one I learned the hard way when I wanted to run gogrepo on Windows, but Windows' Python 3 wasn't working properly, so I had to resort to WSL. Took me around 1 hour to figure out why it wasn't working, and whe I got it working, it still had some bugs (like reseting my gog manifest file)

Edit: forgot a detail in the last answer.

OBJECTION!

Wine Is Not Emulation.

It translates system calls into native system calls.

Actually, to get a graphical program that uses X11 to run (which is almost all programs that don't require Wayland), all you need to do is the following:
* Run an X11 server somewhere that the WSL process has access to.
* Set the DISPLAY variable to point to that screen.
* Start the program, and it should run.

There is, for example, an X11 server called Xvfb that can be used for this purpose. You won't be able to actually see anything (unless you use something like x11vnc to share that "screen"), but it will allow such programs to run. (You could also use xrdp in order to share WSL as a "remote" desktop.)

Or, you could find a vnc server that supports the x11 protocol, like tigervnc, for example.

Note that, in the case of actually wanting to use VNC or RDP, I don't actually know how WSL2 handles networking.

Almost all actual hardware work fine with Linux. And the quality of Linux drivers is better than Windows drivers in general.

However, some rare devices, which do not function via standardized interfaces, might be incompatible.

Just curious: why do you recommend that? I ask at least partly because Gentoo is one of the main distributions committed to keeping systemd away. In fact, the logind and udev replacements commonly used by other distros come from a Gentoo developer. I use openrc, myself, which was (and I thought still is) the default. I also have a convenient way with gentoo to keep pulseaudio away. Both of these I would miss if I went back to Debian. There are Debian derivatives which try to eliminate systemd (I used Devuan on my last tablet, although that ended up dead like all the cheap tablets I get).

Oh, and more on-topic: I use gentoo. I wouldn't recommended it to anyone, regardless. I mean, I like that it provides easy customization via USE flags, simple patching, and other types of overrides, but the price is dealing with aggressive tree cleaning, a package manager that gets so slow that it overshadows the package compile times, often (at least partially) broken packages (e.g. I disable USE=doc on over 100 packages because gentoo devs can't be bothered to test with documentation) and the fact that gentoo is in love with Python (which may or may not bother you, but I don't like the idea of the package manager consuming half my available memory, further slowing compiles down).

I do not use Linux along side Windows any more. I used it in a vm at a previous job because it saved me a trip down to the PC lab to test Windows users' experience. I dual-booted over a decade and a half ago because it was the only way to play some games, but I even play some of the same games now on Wine, and generally uninstall Windows as the first step of getting a new computer, even before powering it on the first time (by replacing the HDD).

I do not recommend using two OSes on the same PC. But then again, even though I run Linux exclusively on my machines, I don't recommend Linux to anyone, because it generally isn't what they expect or want. It's not a toy, and it's not a replacement for Windows.

I have hundreds of gog Windows games (way too many), and about 10% currently don't work for me. Some work without a hitch, and others work only after a lot of work trying various hacks to get them going, and some only barely work. Some suddenly work later on, and some suddenly stop working later on, and just the other day I had a game that did both: using a recent dxvk's d3d9.dll made the graphics finally work after years of being broken, but the game becomes unresponsive to mouse input with wine 5 and up (so I have to keep using wine-4). Some games gog packages as Windows games are not actually Windows games, but games which run on an emulator/engine that you can get a Linux native emulator/engine for (e.g. dosbox, scummvm, ags, java). Also, just because it comes with a Linux binary, doesn't mean it will necessarily work well on Linux (currently 5% of my Linux gog games are non-functional; in fact I just got another one that is unplayably broken and will likely run better in wine). If you go with a mainstream distro with the popular hardware and software, you're probably more likely to have success.

I've used Linux for decades. Some hardware works well, and some just, well, works, sort of. A prime example of this is battery-operated equipment which give a battery status on Windows, but the best you can usually hope for unless it's Logitech is that the device's primary function works. Third party knockoff game controllers with vibration are another thing: you're lucky if it works at all, and will probably never have working vibration or LED support (on the other hand, my DualShock 4 works great). Graphics hardware in particular is iffy; I've stuck with Radeon for nearly 20 years now with reasonable (but not perfect) results. Some people swear by nVidia, but ever since they promised an open source TNT driver and ended up delivering obfusciated C, I've pretty much hated them with a passion. The whole binary vs. source driver debate is pointless, as you can't get documentation, and without documentation, you can't fix real issues or make real imporovements.

That's not even starting to address other types of hardware: WinPrinters, WinScanners, WinModems, WinWhatevers where they make the hardware cheaper by making it less intelligent are almost certain not to work on Linux. Does your wireless card work on Linux? Does your Bluetooth card/dongle work on Linux? Does your ethernet work on Linux? It's both gotten better and worse over the years: you're more likely to find a driver, but you're also more likely to find that the driver is crap, and there's no documentation or even source to back it up, so you can't fix it.

how is that not emulating?:O
just another linux lie

to emulate:
"to imitate (a particular computer system) by using a software system, often including a microprogram or another computer that enables it to do the same work, run the same programs, etc., as the first."
emulator:
"Computers. hardware or software designed to imitate a different piece of hardware or a different software system, in order to do the same work or run the same programs:"

it even creates the windows file structure!

thx for the honest exeprience info

btw why do you use gentoo and not another distro?

Because I used to own machines on different hardware, for various reasons that no longer apply. One of my main machines was a DEC Alpha. Debian's policy of compiling everything for Alpha ev4 (similar to its old policy of compiling x86 software for i386: lowest common denominator is the best way to do a binary-only distro) was hurting my machine, since 32-bit operations were emulated using hardware traps. Most software was 32-bit only (and in fact most still assumes 32-bit ints, even on 64-bit architectures: DEC Alphas were pure 64-bit systems). So I wanted a distro compiled for Alpha ev54 or better, which has native 32-bit support. I also wanted a distro that had a large collection of packages, like Debian, and a large number of supported architectures, like Debian (e.g. I also had ppc, ARM, sparc64 and hppa-1.1 machines). I was also tired of Debian's policy of intentional obsolescence, which it still follows (and is the main reason Ubuntu exists). Gentoo was the only option at the time. In the mean time, I'm down to my last machine, so that need no longer exists (and on that machine, I can't really tell the difference between -march=amd64 and -march=znver1, and in fact I've been burned on over-optimization; e.g. Eschalon started crashing). However, it does still do some things the way I like, such as allowing me to mask out packages and use USE flags to ensure that features I don't want don't get compiled in, and features I do want, do get compiled in (except for 3 or so packages that I need to patch and build myself, like urxvt with keyboard history scrolling).

In any case, I'm too invested now and too near the end of my life to want to switch any more without a compelling alternative. I currently have 3291 packges installed (2220 of which are dependencies), 512 ebuilds in /usr/local/portage (although only 80 are currently installed, and many are from me rescuing packages from mainline removal), 12 third party overlays (the most invasive of which, and probably the source of most of my problems, being multilib-portage), 52 patches in /etc/portage/patches, 84 global USE flag adjustments, and 962 USE flag adjustments for individual packages, among other things. This represents many years of using Gentoo, and is part of why it's so hard for me to switch. It was hard to switch away from Debian (to Gentoo), as well, but not this hard. About the only thing I miss from Debian is aptitude for package management, and that wasn't all that great, either.