I think the greatest strength valve has is being privately owned, rather than having to answer to investors. Combined with them genuinely appearing to care about the state of gaming, it’s a big thing. Especially with their contributions to open source and Linux gaming.

Microsoft and such are all about the money, quality assurance has quietly been abandoned over the years.

Here’s hoping we aren’t disappointed years from now.

I’m really hoping that Valve will end up being a better stewart of the PC ecosystem than Microsoft in the long run.

Outside companies can’t really contribute to Windows development and have no say, so it’s 100% up to Microsoft to look after the Windows ecosystem.

On Linux however, Steam can contribute to the kernel and both audio and graphics systems. All this apart from delivering their Steam service. The same will be the case for GOG, although they probably can’t afford much, and the same will be true for Epic if they want.

Linux has mainly been held up by server development on the professional side, and desktops have been mostly been an afterthought among the ones with the money. Even Linus Torvalds does not use Linux as his personal computer. So most of the Linux desktop was developed by personal private interests with help from Red Hat.
But despite that Linux desktop is pretty damned awesome today with strong alternatives to Gnome. 😀

It can never be the responsibility of Valve alone to keep the Linux desktop alive and thriving, they are merely part of it, and they have been a great boon for Linux, like Red Hat used to be who developed most of the GTK graphics back end, Gnome desktop, Pulse Audio and systemd.

Linux desktop is a very very different ecosystem than Windows, in the way it works, kind of like how Eric Raymond tried to describe in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Unfortunately he failed, and the book and ended out as mostly nonsense, but the book is famous anyway, because it does try to describe the gist of it.

Sometimes, It does really feel like the PC ecosystem can wither and die

The traditional PC is dying, no doubt about it. PC used to be a universal tool for everybody, it isn’t anymore, many people have scrapped their PC, and now just use their phones and sometimes also tablets. The PC is a special interest tool today, and as such it will survive, but at a smaller scale than it used to be on. But as a special tool, it will also keep developing for those special “needs” like gaming, and the PC remains way ahead of any other form of game system in almost every way.

Edit:
Linus Torvalds does indeed use Linux desktop today, he Apparently uses Fedora.
But for many years he didn’t.

Preach, brother/sister! <3

For me if the GOG client can’t offer better support than Lutris I don’t see a reason to use it over Lutris. Not going to lie, the bar is kinda low as I don’t particularly love Lutris but the bar is there for the GOG launcher.

You’re assuming those will work on GoG, that might not be the case unless they do something like Proton, otherwise those old games are Windows/DOS only and so you would have to manually download the binaries and run then through wine or something, so Galaxy coming to Linux wouldn’t affect this.

Difference is, Gog has the moral high ground so to speak. In Steam you don’t own shit - sure, there are convoluted ways to download the installer archives, but it’s a joke compared to GOG.

Other than that, I agree with everything you said.

I think gog takes gift cards but I’m not certain

i don’t understand how a linux user can have the mindset of “well there is already X, why new alternative”. having alternatives is like, our whole thing

No one cares anymore with Lutris and Heroic providing open source implementations.

Lutris follows the horrible Gnome design HIG and Heroic is an Electron web app that always selects weird UI elements by default when using it with a game pad (it’s clearly an afterthought).

If GOG Galaxy happens to just work under SteamOS Game Mode, it’s a massive improvement in my book.

I kind of agree, except for one big difference: cloud save sync. Currently, Heroic et al can sync game saves for Windows GOG games, but for Linux-native games (or Linux builds of multiplatform games), that’s not possible. GOG would have to support Linux cloud saves on the server side.

(For me this is Silksong.)

When they officially have Galaxy for Linux, they will finally have a reason to implement it. And at that point, presumably, the FOSS launchers will be able to utilize it too.

Other than that, having the option of an official GOG Galaxy launcher, with smoother GOG integration and active work both on the client and the server to make everything work better, is a good thing no matter how you look at it. Yes it’s late, but it’s definitely not too late.

I might keep using Heroic. I might switch to this. Time will tell.

That’s what I thought, why not just make a guide to use GOG with Heroic?

I have yet to be able to get my steam controller to work within heroic. Hopefully it works with gog.

No one here cares. My buddies who only started using it via SteamOS I’ve turned to lutris and heroic but the moment this is available for them I know they’ll abandon them for not recognizing them as much as GOG. I hope more will care but those companies unfortunately have that brand recognition people overly suck in

Seems inevitable

I agree that this is a great fit for Bazzite. I’d be surprised if they do not adopt it quickly.