Hi, I'm new to GOG, and liked the idea of all my games listed in one place and automatically updated and stuff, so I gave Galaxy 2.0 a try. In one day it was so bad I just uninstalled. The layout was just horrific.

- Small font for everything, with a massive amount of blank space that could easily be used for larger font, clearer layout.
- 70% of the screen was BS advertising and game descriptions and crap I have NO interest in.
- First game I installed had 2 DLC's, and for the life of me I couldn't find any view that showed what DLC's i had installed, or if they were even installed at all.
- Where Galaxy installed the game there was a heap of junk temp files that are not required at all for the game. Why is Galaxy leaving junk files taking up space on my computer?
- When I went to uninstall it, there was no built in uninstall option. I tried to exit GOG Galaxy to uninstall with Add/Remove Programs and it kept telling me Galaxy was still running. Had to open Process Explorer and find and kill any GOG Galaxy process still running.

Seriously, I have created better application managers myself for my own use. (And probably will for my games after that bad experience). Is this seriously what GOG offers?

Do you want to show us your code repositories? We'd love to have more examples of application management within the FOSS world.

But also, yes. GOG Galaxy is a great example of terrible UX/UI.

Welcome to gog,
What gog have to offer is games without DRM that can be downloaded, installed and for backup whitout need of additional progam unlike steam/epic/ea. Gog galaxy is to be avoided unless you really want badge/success.
You can download offline game in "your Account -> games -> My collection"

Hi, Scruffy. +1 to the avoidance of GOG Galaxy. I'm sorry that this is your introduction. You are on Windows, right? Perhaps you could try Heroic Games Launcher, in combination with something like this python script to download offline backups. Perhaps some people who actually automate every step (I don't) have some more thorough suggestions.

LoL

yea you really need to have some experience in war gaming before you are able to value such a lay-out, I guess :)

Welcome! You are so clever to be able to document so clearly all the problems with Galaxy so quickly, and so confident to be able to complain so assertively!

As you probably already know, you can download offline installers. So you probably already know the answer to your question of what GOG offers. Games!

Galaxy is a junk file. No, GoG also offers offline installers! They are located under the huge annoying blue DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL NOW button.

That threw me off, the first time I signed up for the site. I thought I was just installing the game DRM free and it asked to install some other software as well, and I immediately backtracked.

I thought " how rude " to be misled for such a simple transaction.

Not right now, no. I'm new to GOG, I'll take a look around first. I write for my own or client use, not general consumption. The applications are not of a 'general use' standard. OK thanks, I'll take a look at this Heroic Games Launcher.

+1 for Heroic Games Launcher. I haven't used GOG Galaxy in a while and I recently switched from Lutris to Heroic. Heroic is the best of the three even if it's electron-based (which doesn't matter for the average user tbh)

What are those junk files (ie. how did you recognize they are temp files that are not needed), and how much space are they taking?

I assume Galaxy should remove any temp files needed during the installation, just like the offline installers do. Odd requirement, as I don't think other gaming clients (Steam, Epic etc.) have a "built-in uninstall option" either, if that means there should be some option within the client itself to uninstall itself completely.

It is quite normal that in order to uninstall a gaming client, you do it in the Windows' "Add/Remove Programs" utility.

Galaxy 2.0 is terrible. Slow, slow, slow and slow. And buggy. But mostly slow. [As a Window's user I can't speak on the lack of cross platform arguments which are also perfectly valid given GoG doesn't sell just Window's games]

However, I do like achievements which generally rules out third party launchers such as Heroic (which in fairness I've never tried). I did try PlayNight a few years back but I was less than impressed with that too.

And if I'm playing a current game that gets updates, it is nice when said game does update without intervention.

And so I currently use Galaxy 1.2.67. The API's still seem to be supported, so I get my achievement fix. Against expectations I find turning on cloud saves for some games useful too if I play them between my desktop and my Surface Pro.

I use gogrepoc to download everything under the sun onto a NAS though and generally install from there.

Make everyone a client. Take the side quest that turns the character into a true hero lol

Heroic has achievements (see my profile for example).

It also has playtime sync, cloud saves, and multiplayer support.

Now that is very interesting - I guess I should take a look at this launcher then, thanks for the tip :) (although as a rule bloated electron garbage can get in the bin!)