I kind of gave up on GOG Galaxy around a year ago because feature rollout was slow, integrations kept crashing, achievements I know I had stayed unpopped etc. Tagging multiple games was a nightmare and the launcher felt slow in response.

After a year, nothing has changed. No new features added, no integration stability improvements, tag organization is still slow and clunky. No overlay, forum support is still buried in the store page, no easily accessible community features.

I decided to keep the launcher disconnected from Steam and use it as a GOG only launcher, but to be honest, I have several duplicate games on Steam and GOG and I see little reason to bother with Galaxy for playing those games.

The DRM free aspect is still a cool feature of GOG (nothing to do with this lackluster launcher), so I will continue to buy games on GOG, but this launcher is really disappointing. It seems all but abandoned. I had a hunch that when Cyberpunk launcher, support would be diminshed and rollouts will take a back seat, but seriously, one year of nothing is just... bad. I had high hopes for this launcher, I was especially looking forward to having everything in one place, but since it's stagnating so badly, I'm just going back to Steam for most games.

The last update was in March, but I agree, there has been little progress since Cyberpunk launched.

At the very least, we need major bugs fixed like Game Pass not updating at all. It hasn't synchronised properly for 6+ months.

That said, I've been trying really hard to like Playnite but its UX just sucks compared to Galaxy.

What do you dislike about the Playnite UX?
An X-Button that can be configured to actually closes the damn apllication was enough to win me over.
It's also faster more flexible in how you can set up games.
And with the right theme you can have virtually have any look and feel you like.

Is it really? GoG has given up on the idea of DRM-free, and created Galaxy2.0 just for that

You can still download the offline installer and play games you buy offline without a launcher running. Isn't that the point? You get to use your stuff whenever you want?

Some examples:

1. No additional media displayed for games. No pictures or videos. There are complicated extensions but I am apparently not smart enough to get them to work. Nor do I want to save a copy of videos on my computer. GOG displays pictures and videos out of the box.

2. Cannot display additional information under games in grid view. In GOG I can display things like tags and rating under each poster.

3. Group By does not separate groups in grid view. Everything is just smashed together.

4. Group By does not support toggling ascending/descending on list view. I.e. Group By > Release Year always starts from the oldest games, not the newest.

5. Duplicate handling is terrible. I don't even think it exists. I'm seeing duplicates of hundreds of games.

I also have many complaints about the UI compared to GOG. I could go into great length about the use of colours, font, spacing, etc. Suffice it to say it's clearly built by someone who values function over form. GOG obviously has had UX/UI involved at some point. It's quite beautiful by comparison. I could overlook this stuff if the points above worked as expected. Especially the first.

Well you can embed pictures in the game Description. But you're right videos don't work, there is an issue regarding videos in the Bugtracker since 2018. I wouldn't get my hopes up for the near future. You're right, I never really used the Grid View, but I should be able to add these functionalities. There is really nothing we can do about this (except maybe search for a theme) because it's entirely subjective. I think it looks better, but I too happen to be someone who values function over form.

Galaxy 2 seems abandoned to me. At least if we're talking about the initial promises and perspectives. I wasn't interested in yet another client for my collection of games but an one-for-all library to keep track of my games was something to look for.
Now, after all these years, there is still no official Steam integration and the one that exists doesn't work at all for me. There is an Epic integrator, figures, but there isn't one for Steam where most people own the games given the age of these services? Why?
PlayStation integrator keeps disappearing from time to time, depending on the update and I have to install it again, Galaxy tells me there is an update but it never updates, the client takes way too much power and CPU utilization sometimes just doing nothing visible (10-11% on a Ryzen 7 5800X), "Sync integrations" does nothing and it's slow like hell.
This is the state of GOG Galaxy after all these years. And we still can't share a list of our libraries on GOG accounts...
I had high hopes but now I have none.

Tell me how to download offline installers for games such as Dying Light on Linux, for example. Oh wait, they don't provide the linux version because the Galaxy DRM couldn't be used on linux.
And DRM isn't about using stuff whenever you want, but about identity "lock", that's completely different. Even though not having locks on the game usually implies using it whenever you want.

I was thinking about jumping to Playnite, but it just seemed to refuse to sync all of my Xbox data. Achievements, play time, and even some games just wouldn't show.

Also, downloading the metadata takes a ridiculously long time.

All this forced sitting at a desk time from Covid and they still can get 2.0 decently complete.

What the heck do they do with all their time?

I've always used the offline installers and just started using Galaxy 2.0,

Seems to do what i want, Which is to keep track of my play time and make it easier to keep games up-to-date.

It doesn't really do a whole lot else though (AFAIK).

It tracks your purchases over the different shops, which is a big attraction if you don't buy everything for Steam. Given the massive butthurt going over EGS for years now tells me that majority of people don't, though. Granted, the Metro Exodus stunt was not classy at all but it's soon been three years with no similar incidents and yet people keep on raging against EGS.

Other than that I could pretty much care less, if I want to use steam guides or forum or whatever I just use the steam client, but it's neat I can have Mass Effect LE (Ubisoft), Oxygen Not Included (Steam), Cyberpunk (GOG) and Afterparty (Epic) all within one UI that knows I've recently played them too.

As I said, the only "feature" I really care about is having a library view of all of my games in different platforms sorted with latest first and some search functions to check if I already owned some game I'm thinking of buying on a sale (this happens). Yeah and I want to be able to start the game from that view as well.

If Playnite does that multi-shop integration better than Galaxy 2.0, then great! But somehow I'm a bit sceptical as far as seamless "connection" of the different platforms go as Steam et al are not exactly falling over themselves to help you do this. I wouldn't mind to be proven wrong of course.