Don't get me wrong, the 1.x version wasn't an epic achievement in user interface design but 2.0 is simply awful.

Crap I don't care about taking up the whole screen. Is there some reason that an "achievement" line entry is necessary for every 50 hours of online time? Really? An entire screen of "My progress" recording such milestones as that I've actually visited another player's base! How useful!

And, of course, there does not seem to be any link to the forum anywhere on the multiple pages dedicated to NMS. So to get here it's: fire up a web browser, find the GOG bookmark, click Log In, open my password manager, discover GoG wants TFA, launch the email client on the gaming PC, log in to it to retrieve the TFA key, enter the $%^# key and then navigate to the NMS forum.

What an excremental, awful, useless piece of crap.

And of course, it installed automatically. Lovely.

:D my feelings exactly.

I spent about half hour finding where everthying is, turned off most of the friends / cloud crap, and finding where to change between Experimental beta updates and normal updates had me scratching my head for a while.

So long as it has not become more insecure and provides hackers with new ways to get through a routers firewall then I'm willing to give it some time to get used to.

Fingers crossed the games I like to beta test will not be much longer in pushing out experimental versions, and I can revert to purely Offline installations and uninstall Galaxy.

I really dont like that when you click the X close gadget (top right of the screen), it goes into your system tray still running, so when you think you are launching a game in offline mode (from a custom icon on your desktop) you are then playing the game with some online aspects working. You have to make sure after you have checked the games for updates, to go into the Gear Icon (traditionally used for Settings, not main menus) to Exit the client fully .. Why???

There is no behaviour setting for the system tray either. You would think it would be in the same place as the "Start with windows" option (also switched off in my case), but nope.

I always get this "Sorry, we couldn't load the data. Retry" message - See attached screenshot below - Which is probably because I have something switched off or always try to play the games offline without Galaxy running, am I doing something GOG was not expecting users to be doing?, and if so that does not bode well for my concerns with client security if they cant anticipate just what users would be doing with a client. Hackers will probably have a field day.

All I want Galaxy to do is occasionally check for Beta Experimental updates to games (on demand, not all the time). If I want updates to public releases I just want to download the Offline Installers via a more secure browser.

They have made it like a desktop interactive advertising banner, to try and encourage more sales and manage games you have bought from other stores .. None of which appeals to me, but it does concern me that they have now made the client potentially more vulnerable to being exploited, bigger footprint in capability means more complicated security for them to keep on top of = I trust it a lot less than I used to (which wasn't good to start with, I hate game clients).

I also dont like that we were auto-updated, but then if we stay with the old version it would no longer be supported and would gradually become more of a security risk, so we have to go through the new versions teething troubles. The least I need to run it the better imho

My biggest issue so far was not having a link to the forums. Then I figured out that I could go to the store page for said game and get to the forum from there.

Yes, definitely all UX team, QA people and project management got corona-brain. Also for me it installed despite I explicitly said NO when it asked to install the update. Probably programmers were hit too. It is still in beta. Shit happens in beta, but no idea why we were forced to be beta-testers. I'm sure they'll patch it up and improve things eventually and we'll get used to them sooner or later. It brings some benefits anyway.

Thank you mbailey56 for pointing out workaround with store page to get to the forum. Not very convenient, but still something.

Galaxy not closing is a problem that has been around for several years and that was with version 1.1something.

One can close most of Galaxy by clicking on the Settings icon and then selecting Exit from the dropdown list but the Background Process GalaxyCommunicationService will continue running and the only way to close that is to go through Task Manager.

The last response that I received from GOG on the failure to fully close and exit Galaxy was in spring 2017 and included "We decided to remove it, since now Exit is available in the dropdown menu in the top left corner. If you wish to see it restored, I recommend the Galaxy wishlist." Posts in the Galaxy forum were not answered by GOG although GOG staff had participated in that thread. There also had been some discussion of this in the NMS forum a month or two before I submitted the support request.

Galaxy 1.0 remained in beta for several years. At least because it was in beta when I started in 2016 and did not come out of beta status until sometime in 2018 or 2019 (or so I recall but not willing to spend the time finding the announcement and discussion.

Glad to be of some help.

That is simply bizarre. It would never have occurred to me. Why visit the store page for a game I already own? (Scratches head. Shakes head. Regrets giving up drinking.)

LOL

EDIT:
wrong place

Guys if you haven't received the email ..

Download GOG Galaxy 2 manually, and install it again.

https://www.gog.com/galaxy/

Apparently there is a version which updated us from the previous version, which will not update again.

If you want to check, go to the Settings Icon top left, and have a look at the changelog.

If you are not on version 2.0.15, then you have the version which is stuck and cannot update itself!

Shambles.

Edit: Just changed the link to https://www.gog.com/galaxy - The one in the email looks suspicious to me

Edit 2: Disregard my concern about the email being suspicious, a GOG Team member has confirmed the email was legit, see this post https://www.gog.com/forum/general/warning_possible_gog_galaxy_fake_mails/post16

Completely agree. I found a link for the 1.x version and installed it again. The ONLY things I use it for are updates/conectivity for NMS and the forum (also for NMS).

Call me a crazy old man, but I like to install and use my single player games individually. I'd do the same with NMS too if wasn't being updated and didn't need that GOG service for discovery sharing.

The only reason I use Galaxy is for installing and online connectivity in NMS. It's a worse UX for sure. Maybe there's some better coding or something behind-the-scenes? Idk but yeah, the new Galaxy is a mess for users. Same here. Removing the forums link makes no sense.

I've also noticed that the total hours and days since last played have not updated for a couple of weeks, since 2.0.15 was released.

That's great, since now the Overview page, which is important enough that it's the default landing page for the game, is getting more and more out of date.

...pretend there's an eyeroll emoji here...

Crazy old woman here, me too. I uninstalled it and went back to 1.2 as soon as I saw it. The dark colour scheme with no light option alone would have made me revert because dark screens hurt my eyes and give me headaches. It looked so cluttered too, although I didn't look around it much due to the darkness.

I really object to forced updates of any software, when Windows went that way I switched to Linux, but what kind of idiots force a beta on everyone? I do have a Windows laptop now for games that need it but the Linux box is used for everything else.

I have noticed that the tracker has been updating the time played but it is displayed in hours and minutes (both Galaxy and NMS). What I just noticed is that the difference in hours played between Galaxy and NMS tracking seem to be increasing but I honestly don't pay much attention to these since the total number of hours played is getting to be a bit depressing. I only have one other game from GOG that I have played and that has so few hours that this does not account for the difference between Galaxy and NMS tracking. There always was a bit of a difference anyway due to reconfiguration of NMS servers back around Atlas or so.

Does rolling back to an older version of Galaxy really work? What I mean is that since Galaxy is automatically updating to 2.0 it seems that reinstalling an older version isn't going to help much and will automatically force 2.0 right back. If they are still doing the phased rollout of 2.0 reinstalling 1.2 might move someone down to the bottom of the list so could buy some time but it seems that the phased rollout period should be over by now.