why would anyone want a client, people come here for the opposite and that is to avoid that.

I'm not sure you're aware, but Heroic already has cloud saves. Achievements may be coming as well.

In the meantime you can always wine Galaxy. Though that's pretty janky, I agree.

And I hear you on wanting a native Linux client, but please consider the reality. Just think about what you're asking for. GOG will never manage to catch up to even the free, this-is-not-my-day-job projects in terms of features and functionality. I seriously doubt it. So what's the point with a half-assed native client? We already see this with half-assed native ports - people just use Wine/Proton on the Windows versions instead due to a better experience.

What exactly would you gain? And for what? This company operates basically like a charity if you look at the profits on a long term trend. You want them to hire a person to develop this? Um, yeah. Not gonna happen, mate.

I listed my reasons in my reply.
- I don't know what Heroic is. Could you explain it to me?

- Yes Galaxy is awful on Wine and it's cloud features work poorly on it

- I'm not asking for - or expecting - anything, just putting out my opinion as a customer. GOG can take it or leave it. As a customer I don't care at all about GOG's financials or operations. The only kind of relationship I have with GOG is a financial one.

At the end of the day the reality is what I initially stated; more and more I'm dropping GOG for Steam when choosing where I get my games from because of GOG's lack of Linux support (and by support I mean their client support mostly).

there are plenty of good native games, more recently return to monkey island or psychonauts 2 which run great on linux. proton isnt ideal since its not native real linux games.
what is wrong with local saves? i dont think that is much of a reason to use a client. not worth sacrificing dealing with steam drm just for that.

I play on multiple OSes and machines and I like having my saves, achievements etc synced. I could manually sync them but that is giving me more work; I'd rather use a client that does that for me. Also like being able to play multiplayer games with my friends.

I might sound like a fan, but that's because I am, so here goes.

Heroic Games Launcher is a cross-platform game launcher, as the name implies, for GOG, Epic and Prime.

https://heroicgameslauncher.com/

It uses a utility called GOGDL in the backend, which does not use offline installers to my understanding but instead uses the Galaxy API installation methods. This makes installations much faster and you download less as well. Heroic now has xdelta patching and reverting to previous versions too. The downside is of course no offline installers, but lgogdownloader is a perfect tool for that already, or gogrepoc too.

Heroic has cloud saves, but no achievements or multiplayer functionality. I keep hearing rumours these are coming though, and that the devs might have even gotten in touch with GOG devs about this. So fingers crossed!

Heroic has Wine-GE as default, plus all the bells and whistles and customisation that you will ever need. Mangohud, feral gamemode, FSR hacks, fsync, EAC/battleye anticheats, VKD3D, DXVK-NVAPI, and of course your choice of wine versions and DXVK. Basically most things you will need, and then some. Lutris still wins with older games, e.g. for DOS, as it has dgVoodoo2 implemented as a toggle for example. Lutris also has offline installers by default, but I don't see the point for singular games, and if you need batch downloads for backup purposes you have lgogdownloader. But to each his own.

It also looks pretty slick and is surprisingly snappy. It's under rapid development, it's crazy how far it's come in a year.

Hard recommend for GOG. Close second is Lutris, though.

The Galaxy client UI is not responsive on Linux, that's certainly true. But I'm only in the client for like 10 seconds to launch or update something. The cloud features all seem to work fine for me. I'm not sure what you are talking about. Can you give an example of what's not working for you?

If you are fine w/ not having a DRM free copy of something go ahead and purchase the Steam version. I think I speak for most people when I say I don't care. I buy games on both platforms.

Like rojimboo said, Heroic is a pretty good option if you need a sleeker client experience. But every option, Steam or no Steam, has trade offs. So pick an option and move on.

What Steam does have way better than GOG is controller support through the client, it's freaking amazing, specially if non-standard gamepads are used. With a bit of tinkering is even possible to use controller/wheel/hotas that is not natively supported on some game.
This is true for both Windows and Linux (although my experience in this regard on Linux is limited).

I wish there's was a freaking huge banner that cover all the screen, flashing blue/yellow/red with a warning that most software need to be in the directory you mentioned.
Running games from a pen drive or external disk is pain in the knee. Once I figured out what to do it's very easy, even a dumb f*cker like me can do it :)
Now if solving the issue with proper window size on some games (usually games without a lot of settings) was as easy as copying the games for a determined folder I would be happy as heck.

While flatpacks are nice in the dependency regard, having to download 500MB+ for a 3MB program is ridiculous.

Pertinent edit: one issue with bottles unable to access all folder locations that was hard to diagnose, is running GOG installers with separate files (1 .exe and a few .bin) on a external hard drive. The installer may start or just quit and not always running through terminal show a permission error. The installer need to be inside the said folder to be able to install the game properly.
Easy solved by bookmarking the directory on a file manager (since it's quite long and combersome) and copy every file.

I don't think that's far off from what Steam does too. It tracks common redistributables and libraries apps need and makes them dependencies of the install.

I don't use Flatpacks but I think it reuses stuff similar to Steam's shared depots.

They appear to have tried to fix it by automatically creating symlinks to common directories like Desktop, Documents, Pictures, etc.. In my case, I have all my games in my ~/games folder, so it didn't work. Hopefully Flatpak/Portals eventually implement some way to ask for permissions, because that would fix this issue.

Try Gamescope. I regularly play Visual Novels from the 2000s that have broken fullscreen. Window resolution and fullscreen just works in Gamescope, even if it's a hacky way of doing it. Easiest way to install it is via Flatpak, and Bottles/Lutris provide easy ways of managing Gamescope's settings.

Flatpak does de-duplicate libraries where possible, but lots of software (especially games) rely on different versions of the same libraries, so it can be quite a storage hog...there's unfortunately not a better way of doing it; it's already better than each game shipping with every dependency they need because Flatpak offers some de-duplication benefits where available and saves a small amount of storage space.
Not THX1342, but I tried installing GOG Galaxy using the Lutris.net installer script. I was able to login, but just before the client window opens, my entire desktop crashes back to the display manager. GNOME/Wayland. Happens consistently.

Here's all I do to install it:

-----------------------------------------------------------
#The current version can be downloaded here:
https://gog-cdn-fastly.gog.com/open/galaxy/client/2.0.73.27/setup_galaxy_2.0.73.27.exe

#Define the folder where you want GOG's prefix to be:
export WINEPREFIX=/home/g/games/GOG/

#Run setup to install/upgrade galaxy
wine "setup_galaxy_2.0.73.27.exe"
--------------------------------------------------------

Run it:
--------------------------------------------
export WINEPREFIX=/home/g/games/GOG/
cd "/home/g/games/GOG/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/GOG Galaxy/"
wine GalaxyClient.exe

I'm using wine-8.21 with KDE Plasma (Wayland)

I tried again with Wine 9.3 on KDE Plasma 6 (Wayland), but all I got was a black screen where a login prompt should be. NVIDIA, by the way...

I do see the window as being all black for a short while before the login prompt is filled in. Is it possible it's just really slow to start?

You aren't doing anything to block network communications are you? Otherwise I am not sure what the problem is.

I waited about ten minutes. On my GNOME Intel machine, it's only black for a few seconds. There's so much log output I can't be bothered digging through on my KDE machine. Normally I would try DXVK for this sort of error; I think I tried GOG Galaxy on a DXVK-enabled WIneprefix on my GNOME machine.

I have uBlock Origin in my browser with heavy content-blocking on, but nothing at the network level.

Not really a big deal. I was just curious if I could get it working. I remember getting it working (poorly, but working) a few years ago in Wine.

I do think Galaxy uses DX11 and DXGI so DXVK is not a bad idea. However I've tried it with a new prefix and just WINE and it worked. So I don't know why it's not displaying for you. Sorry.