Hello,
I play The Witcher 3 (GOTY) on Linux through Wine. While the game works fine when started directly from the exe, it won't when launched from Galaxy: I get an alert saying "witcher3.exe has crashed" or, randomly, a black screen with the process doing nothing and taking high CPU usage.

I've been told on Reddit that if Galaxy is running in the background and the game is started independently, it will still track the achievements but not the time played. While this would be ok, it would be better if it worked completely.

Anybody here on Linux has experienced the same issue and found a fix?

i think there's a linux variant of galaxy called comet floating around the forums somewhere. i think it may be made by the same person who made the gogdb website. might be worth a look

Thanks, I'll look into this but does it have all Galaxy features (cloud saves, achievements tracking, eventually game time tracked...)? I'd be surprised that the GOG API needed for this is public.

EDIT: found a thread, haven't read it in full yet. It seems to be some kind of interface to access the Galaxy multiplayer features, not really an alternative to the client: "Comet emulates a Galaxy client to allow games to use the Galaxy multiplayer service on Linux. It currently only has a console interface and is very limited in functionality. The supported games at the moment are limited to the Stardew Valley beta [...]"

i don't think hairworks works on linux (this may have changed since cuda has become open-source) but i can't really recommend anything apart from the reddit trick if it works. if its any consolation, galaxy has many issues on windows with users reporting crashes etc regularly. :)

I have an AMD GPU anyway, so it doesn't work but I don't really care about the hair effects feature. ;)

Overall, the game works fine (I've only tried the beginning so far), it's just that it doesn't start from Galaxy, so I'm checking if it's a known issue that has a fix.

Actually if you use DXVK wine, hairworks will work with an AMD GPU. It did with my rx 580.

Mmm... I use DXVK, I have a RX 560 but the hair features didn't seem to work when I tried.

Or maybe you mean that there are some tweaks needed in any case and they now apply to AMD GPUs as well as nVidia when using DXVK?

What version of DXVK do you use?

I always install the latest one when I hear it's out. I haven't played TW3 yet, only tested the beginning. When I did, it was two or three weeks ago, so it was probably already 0.96, maybe 0.95.

You should try with the newest version. It works for me without the need of doing some tweaks.

Yeah, I'll check again when I play TW3 (currently, I'm on Thronebreaker).

Ok, I've found the origin of the issue: it's the overlay from Galaxy. I've started using Galaxy recently and didn't know that it could be disabled.

So, I can now start the game. Side question, just in case: when disabling the overlay, do Galaxy features (time tracked, achievements...) still work?

What have you done to make it work through wine?

Wine had no trouble installing the witcher, or patching it. It also starts the uninst000.exe without issue.
However, all i get for the game itself is
wine: Bad EXE format for [path]\The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt GOTY\bin\x64\witcher3.exe :(

Nothing special. I have a specific Wine prefix for Galaxy (with a few tweaks applied for it) but TW3 also worked when using a new one.

The Witcher 3 is 64 bit (at least in your example, I don't know if there's a 32-bit version also available), so do you have a 64 bit version of Wine installed?

What does it say if you use the command file on the exe (in a shell, cd to the directory [path]\The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt GOTY\bin\x64, then file witcher3.exe)? It's a command that gives you the type of a file, it would be to check that it's indeed identified as a Windows binary.

file output:
witcher3.exe: PE32+ executable (GUI) x86-64, for MS Windows

you put me on the right track. Looks like my wine install was only compatible with 32bit, i've replaced it with wine64.
i'm sort of worried i'll now be unable to run other stuff i previously used wine for, like Mech Commander: Darkest Hours, but for Witcher 3 at least this works just fine.