I’m looking for discussion and suggestions about the best way to play games from GOG on linux.
My current method is that I’ve got GOG Galaxy installed with bottles, and then I use GOG Galaxy to install and launch the Windows games. That’s working alright so far. One downside is that won’t install Iinux versions like that, so for games that have a native linux version I have to decide if I want to install it separately, or just run the windows version with the others. So that isn’t perfect. Another minor thing I don’t like is that since I’m installing games via GOG Galaxy via Bottles via Flatpak… I end up having very little idea of where stuff is being saved. It’s difficult to find save game files for example; and if there is some junk installed or left over from something, there’s very little chance that I’m going to notice and delete it. It just feels very opaque. (I guess that’s mostly just about my personal lack of knowledge though.)
Anyway, I’m mostly just wondering how others are choosing to handle their games from GOG.
The Heroic Games Launcher is (IMHO) by far the best interface to gog you can have on linux.
You can find it on the AUR if you use arch, which makes it pretty straightforward to install.
The next version will integrate with the Galaxy API using the comet project, which should make it even better.
The only problem I had with it is that, once upon a time, there was a bug with downloading some games (Cyberpunk 2077, in my case) and I had to compile the git version of Gog-dl and target that in the settings… but the fact I could even do that is great by itself.
Can confirm, Heroic is great
After ignoring it because Epic sucks, I recently realised that https://heroicgameslauncher.com/ is a really nice GOG client as well.
One of the reasons I prefer GOG is that I don’t want to use a client. I prefer to download offline installers and then run my games through Lutris or Heroic Games Launcher.
I really enjoy mini galaxy
You can have both naitive and wine games all listed in the one launcher to keep all your gog games together
And finding data for the games is easy because you can just navigate to it from the launcher
Heroic Launcher has GOG support and in my experience works well.
I use Lutris. It downloads the Linux installers when available and every game gets its own folder.
But it won’t help you with finding save files. GOG especially has many old games and over the years there have been many different “standards” to store save files and on top of that most games didn’t even follow any standard. Use PC Gaming Wiki to find where save files are stored.
When I was first getting started, I briefly tried Lutris - but was put off by two things. The first was that it felt very complicated. I was new to Linux at the time, and I’m being asked helps of config questions about how to install which-and-what components in order to use such-and-such runners or launcher or whatever… basically just a heap of stuff that I didn’t really understand. And when I tried using a recommend ‘gold rated’ auto-setup to install something, it just froze. So that was disappointing. I decided that maybe I’d try something else.
I’ve seen Lutris recommended in a lot of places; so apparently it’s pretty good. But at the time I used it, it wasn’t really what I was looking for. I think a lot of people praise Lutris for the way it lets you have case-by-case special configurations for all sorts of things, which might allow you get some stubborn stuff working. But for me, it felt like more things I could break. I’ve got enough games that I’m happy enough to just say that if it doesn’t work then I won’t play it. So I guess Lutris wasn’t for me. [edit - Bottles also had a lot of config choices to get started; but I was lucky enough that what I picked worked first time; and I haven’t looked at the config since.]
Honestly, I can see that. I’ve just gotten used to Lutris over the years, even before Valve released Proton.
I mainly like Lutris as a tool to manage all of my games with easy ways to share common configuration steps between them. But I also see it going the way most Wine helpers went over the years. At first it works brilliantly for everyone. Then the pre-made configurations fail to work for edge cases or they fail when a game is updated. Eventually it’s easier to configure everything by hand and then you don’t need the tool anymore until the next one comes along.
But they started an initiative with Bottles, Heroic and other programs to make standardised configurations. Pair that up with Valve’s efforts in Proton and the overall rising popularity of Linux gaming and we might get better and better tools down the line until they aren’t needed anymore.
Running Galaxy with proton-ge. Sure, it doesn’t install linux versions of games or anything, but it works.
Basically what I did was:
- run arch btw, obviously and loaded with sarcasm, as always
- install https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/proton-ge-custom-bin
- aquired galaxy installer (GOG’s site hides download links on linux… why???)
proton gog-galaxy-installer.exeto install. It installs to~/.local/share/proton-pfx/0/pfx/drive_c/Program Files/GOG Galaxy(or somesuch)- I made a shortcut to launch the galaxy.exe with proton from the directory & using the directory as working directory
- profit.
Seems to work fine, some older version of proton-ge and/or nvidia driver under wayland made the client bit sluggish, but that has fixed itself. Games like Cyberpunk work fine. The galaxy overlay doesn’t, though.
That sounds like a similar setup to what I’m doing; just using proton-ge rather than bottles. Perhaps your way is a bit more light-weight, which is probably nice.
I only did so because I had installed proton-ge. You know, “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” -type of thing. :D
