this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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I really wish GOG made Galaxy for Linux already.
tbh, i never really used galaxy so i guess i have no idea what i'm missing. if it's just an online install client kinda like steam but for gog content, that wouldn't really interest me too much but if it lets me download offline installers as a batch job, that alone would be totally worth it (i have no idea if it does that already or not)
Update: It looks like it's handling the offline installers in game-by-game batches. I told it to download the offline installer for a game that if I used browser I'd have to download two files; it shows as just one item and one download in the client, and I verified that it actually does give me both files.
ok, you convinced me that I want Galaxy for Linux too 😁
the achievements, social, and install management stuff wasn't too important for me but having it simplify offline installer downloads vs doing it from browser would be great.
Definitely agree that being able to control install location + whether or not to update is nice (compared to steam) but I was comparing vs what I can already do in the offline installers so I guess that's why it didn't matter to me if the client could do it. But some games you need to download a lot of files which is kind of a pain in the ass from the browser (especially when it's something you need to run under wine since gog tends to split windows games into multiple pieces/.bin files more often than they do native linux ones from what i've seen).
I thought the file splits are based on size? But maybe I'm wrong. The larger games I have also tend to be Windows-only anyway so maybe I just don't know this stuff.
they are based on size but it's only the windows versions. for example, if you buy witcher 2, it has windows and linux versions. linux version is a single ~20 GiB file while the windows version has a small exe + lots of bin files that are 1.5 GiB or less and you need all of them to install.
Oh, I see. That's quite interesting. And I noticed that the Mac version is only split into 4 parts, with one clocking in at 11.6 GB (though others are capped at 4 GB).
I'm very curious why these differences exist.
Oh yeah, completely forgot about Mac version lol.
As for why, no way to know for sure without inside info, but best guess is that they are trying to account for maximum file size limits across all the various possible Windows/Mac filesystem types but whichever employee setup the Linux ones realized that most Linux users wouldn't be using shitty Microsoft filesystems. FAT12 is fairly safe to ignore but they might have been considering FAT16 and HFS as the lowest common denominators, then making the files slightly smaller than the max file size just in case.
That or possible that they were balancing by network loads (since Windows versions probably account for around 99% of all downloads) and that was somehow determined to be the sweet spot.
In addition to installing and launching the games, there are cloud saves, achievements, time tracking, leaderboards for achievements (which integrates Steam achievements for anyone who's linked their Steam profile), overlay, some multiplayer stuff, and more. In this respect it has social features and game management features similar to what Steam has.
GOG Galaxy is also meant to be a universal launcher so you can use "integrations" to have Galaxy launch other games through their respective clients and even have it close the client afterwards. You can also add your own independently-installed games, as long as they show up in a database of games that they use (I dunno where it's from but these days it has pretty much everything I've looked for, aside from romhacks, but for that matter, I'm pretty sure you could make it launch any executable with any label and Galaxy wouldn't question you). That said, I'm used to just launching things from game executables directly so I don't use it for this anyway lol.
Also Galaxy offers more flexibility with managing game installs than the Steam client does. For one, you can set the install directory to anywhere, rather than being locked in Steam\steamapps\common\gamename. And pretty importantly IMO, there's an easily accessible (though non-default, which is fine IMO) option to tell the game to not update, and the Galaxy client won't try to force you to update (unlike the Steam client). (EDIT: there's also a universal default for whether to auto-update games, in addition to per-game settings.) On top of this Galaxy also has more UI options than Steam does, e.g. having a List View option (which Steam unceremoniously junked several years ago in favor of their current mess).
I'm actually about to check out its ability to download standalone installers. I started a couple very big game downloads last night on my browser and they failed so I'm gonna see if the client can do better with stuff like resuming downloads.