Honestly what's the point in having it? Heroic is already a better option. GOG Galaxy is a simple launcher, if they port it to Linux then it would also need to be a Wine/Proton prefix manager. Its not a massive amount of work, especially since umu-launcher exists now, but its just pointless effort IMO. Unless they're willing to invest the same amount of work into it that has gone into Heroic and Lutris, it'll just end up being the inferior option.

tbf with heroic launcher starting to implement comet (galaxy api), it might not be needed anymore

Look at what happened when Epic brought a store to Windows

Those barriers still exist on Linux

GoG makes even less sense to have a launcher because you can just download off their website

Because it doesn't make business sense to them. The author of the article makes just two arguments and assumes those are the only relevant arguments. There's a lot more involved in the decision to port GOG Galaxy to Linux. Like support, for example.

Personally, since proton got so good and heroic can just use any version of proton installed, I've began to buy GOG games again and run them through heroic. 99% of the time they just run OK. But of course I do my due diligence and check protondb before making a purchase.

GOG doesn't really do much to maintain the Galaxy app unfortunately. The idea of being able to put your entire library into one launcher is appealing but half of the plugins don't even work. Even the steam one is broken out of the box these days (there is a newer version on GitHub, but I don't think it's official). So them not porting to Linux is unsurprising.

I use GOG to get away from downloading things in the context of a store and have a nice little archive of installers to use whenever I want it. I am trying to get as many Steam games to just be that way so when I run the binary it just works without Steam being involved at all. Laughably few will do it on their own but there are some ways around others...

Yeah, quite happy without some bloated launcher, thanks.

I think the bigger complaint is that, when Galaxy was released, GOG said (back in 2015)

A Linux version of our client is planned eventually ... Stay tuned for future announcements

Ten years is plenty of time to implement a launcher, or at least give a planned timeline

Sure, third parties have done it with Heroic, etc. but promising support and not delivering leaves a really bad taste to me

Because Linux still makes up a small % of PC Gamers, so CDPR hasn't prioritized it. Plus they'd need to have some kind of proton-like middleware (or just proton) for the majority of their games (which are mostly 15-20+ years old) to be playable. It seems like a large engineering challenge for a company which isn't nearly as wealthy as valve

I've been with linux for 20 years now and at one point GOG was the place to go, because DRM was one of the biggest problems with wine.

I downloaded all my games stopped using it after they came up with their own electronic store, which I thought was a horrible shit and very clunky on wine.

Steam and proton were rising at the same time and more and more games were working without the usual fuss of installing .dll files, obscure media codecs, .net and etc, so it was bye bye GOG.

Heroic Games Launcher, supports gog cloud saves, full wine/proton integration and even store front.

Because cdpr is a joke. Like did you see cyberpunks release? All they care is about money they showed that with their rushed job. I haven't claimed any free games on GOG because you have to sign up for their newsletter in order to claim the game. I still get spammed with emails from GOG even after unsubscribing after I receive every single email. At this point of just marked em' as spam.

I used to purchase everything I could from GOG until I switched to Linux full time. I still like the company and buy some from them, but until they become more Linux friendly or Steam gets worse I'll still prioritize Steam now. And it's not only the (very odd) resistance to making a Linux version of Galaxy, I've also seen them not offer Linux versions of games even when the developers have released it on other platforms.

Yeah, they promised Linux support years ago with Galaxy 2.0.
It's basically the reason why I always prefer Steam for my games.