Well, there is no point to bring headless servers as potential gaming base. Were are obviously talking about regular desktops / laptops here.

Huh? NWN works perfect for me, in both Wineskin and Crossover. Better than the original Aspyr port actually (which I also own), in that it actually runs well on Intel Macs. What's giving you problems?

What I was saying is, that Linux is not still viable gaming platform while there's lot of Linux use around. Even if you have high end PC it stll might not work as a gaming platform because of driver issues for an example.

Just support the top three distributions and let the rest figure out themselves how to get it to run. That would be a reasonable compromise in my eyes.

I step forward would be if the DosBox or ScummVM games could be downloaded as OS independent package.

Although that really is just one extra step - after all how many people who game in Linux don't know how to install a game in WINE to get the game files which they then put in the Linux DOSBox frontend of their choice? It's barely an extra step since you still have to uncompress the file and then put it in the Linux DOSBox frontend :P (I half-kid).

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I think GOG should provide Linux support, but give them time people. Statements like "GOG's seeming irrational ill will toward Linux" are silly. GOG isn't doing anything to deliberately stop you from playing games on Linux anymore than they were for playing games on Mac before they officially added support. They already have "unofficial" support taken care of in that way. Not having native versions when they are available is more annoying, but GOG's stance is that they have to officially support the game and if they can't do it, they won't add the game (and no tech demos do not count, that is the definition of an exception that proves the rule). There aren't even that many indie games on GOG with Linux versions - and though some of those also have a Mac version, GOG doesn't necessarily sell the Mac version either (e.g. Trine) despite having official support for Mac now. There are legal issues beyond technical ones.

Valve is only just now adding Linux support for Steam and it is much bigger with far bigger resources and Steam is older. And what other-OS did they add first? OS X. Barring some implosion of CDP, GOG, Linux, the internet, or all of the above, I believe GOG will support Linux one day. Pushing for that support is all well and good, but let's be rational about it. GOG would need to hire support people, build infrastructure, and re-negotiate legal contracts to sell games supporting Linux distros. They may choose to do that, but all of that takes time. It took them a year for OS X. Linux would/will probably take them at least as long (if not longer) if they started now which they probably won't as they try to settle in supporting Mac games first. Push, but patience is a virtue.

What kind of drivers? If you have your OpenGL and ALSA/PulseAudio/OpenAL working properly - you should be set. And if you are a gamer and Linux user - that's easily taken care of. Unless you are talking about some rare gaming hardware with missing drivers, like joysticks or what not.

I've yet to manage install any Linux distro without doing some time consuming tweaking on some driver or an another. usually it's the graphics adapter drivers, especially if I've wanted to use 3D acceleration. Sound drivers have been an another issue as well, especaily with embedded chips.

Despite the chips might tbe according to standards, it might be slighty different from what the actual standard is and you need to manually tweak the ALSA drivers. And this by itself can be time consuming.

These are issues you rarely see in Windows and I do think Linux would benefit greatly from a bit more open stance for proprierity drivers. Not everything needs to be 100% open.

Honestly, what most people in here don't seem to get is that I would personally be fine with an "OS agnostic" package instead of having either a .exe or a .dmg. Most game files are exactly the same (dosbox and scummvm games) and those games already run "natively" on Linux just as well as on Windows and Mac.

Why can't they just give us an OS independent package (like a .zip or .rar) that we can download and extract? Then we can just think for ourselves on how to handle the rest.
It bothers me quite a lot having to use innoextract to ship my gogonlinux packages simply because there's no other way around it (it also creates one more dependency in my software and can be a cause of bugs and errors)

Well you're using wine anyway, why not just use that to start the installer?

Because the installer is pretty slow and relies on the user input to know what he's doing. Extracting file data with innoextract and placing them where they need to be placed (that plus patching all the scripts and everything else required to run the game) can all be automated through a script and I'll be sure where the user actually decided to install the game.

It would be a huge issue if somebody installs a game in a directory that is not the directory that my client tracks, uninstalling would be pretty much impossible.

For every Linux or Mac OS user deliberately downloading the manual package there would be ten or a hundred Windows users downloading it without realising the consequences and then being frustrated when the game doesn't run properly. They would ultimately blame GOG for providing a confusing download option.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

I never said they'd need to make it readily available for everyone. Through their web API I can download either a win_installer or mac_installer, however there's no option to just download the data (the installer is just a wrapper around said data, like a .zip but in a specific OS-type format).
They can let normal users download Windows and Mac installers through their site and let people who know how to do their job download the more specialized version so we can try to package Linux versions of games without added troubles :)

There, fixed that for you, and that's speaking from experience having to create installers for our IDE that work on all platforms we support because the users are too idiotic to be able to install it otherwise (and we're talking about software developers as users here).

Because, as it is convincingly described here , one cornerstone (maybe THE cornerstone) of the sucess of the digital distributors overall (not only GOG) is the convenience of their service (to be able to compete with piracy & free). At the moment, Linux gaming solutions are not enough hassle free, for various reasons.

Why people are asking for linux as gaming platform? Maybe they asking for the wrong reasons for a problematic solution... maybe there are better fitting alternatives?

There are only two reasons I can imagine for linux as gaming platform:
+ free as beer
+ free as speech (unrestricted unlike windows etc) ...

That's all on pros for linux as gaming platform, on the down side are:
- fragmented or non-existing platform (hard to support ecosystem)
- bad hardware support (too small and further smaller through fragmentation & continous regressions)
- bad support for ISV developed binary software (continous breakage of ABI/APIs, e.g. all loki packages are broken)
- no unified and complete game development SDK (like directX... only opengl)
- bad support for existing PC applications(games) as existing major platform
- developer focussed culture and design, not user focussed (tending to unconvenient solutions)
- distro limited update cycles for apps (OS integrated apps -> distro, leading to outdated apps)
- unfitting unix architecture: workstation-server focus from the 70s instead of (local) PC focus... and so on.

But, there is another potential game platform which has all the pros and lacks several of the downsides:
+ free as beer
+ free as speech (Open source software, yeah!)
+ stable platform, reasonable to support
+ good driver support (windows one)
+ good compatility with windows apps & games
+ PC model / user focussed design
+ good support of ISV developed binary software (like windows years of compatibility)
- still in alpha

.. it's called Reactos, maybe gog.com should support this one as next platform? ;c)

I'm sorry but you misunderstood me. What I'm really asking is for them to provide us with a simple .zip file with the game data instead of ONLY packaging it into a .exe. This isn't even about providing support to Linux. As I already said, let the users support Linux themselves (see: gogonlinux) if you don't want to, I have nothing against it. Just don't make our job harder :)

Those are good reasons yeah. There are also other reasons but most of the rest is just user preference really (I find myself better acquainted with Linux than Windows for example but that's just me I guess)

No, not really. Only if you want to provide support for every specific distro. The "Linux" platform is the same on all distros. But I can see this as a downside and being counter-intuitive for providing support to end-users so I may agree

This is false, both nvidia and AMD are providing native support for their binary (proprietary, but whatever) drivers and cards and the drivers are getting better and better every day. It's not 1995 anymore. Also most hardware works out of the box (except maybe some issues with wifi drivers but if you don't have wifi/internet you can't connect to gog.com so that's not a gog issue either)

Uh.. what? The user level interface has been the same (or at least backwards compatible) since the 1.0 kernel version. If you're talking about device drivers then the whole development process is open for everyone to see the changes that "break compatibility" and even then, it doesn't matter a single bit to the gaming world (I already explained that GPU vendors already ship with native binary drivers so that won't be your concern)

OpenGL is on par with DirectX and I don't really understand what you're trying to say here... By that logic developers won't ever target game consoles (they don't use DirectX for that) or Mac

I don't understand what this is supposed to mean either. Are you saying there are no games on Linux? Because that's a known fact and is also inaccurate, there are plenty of indie games an some commercial games. Which is, funnily enough, a huge portion of the gaming industry that gog.com targets (indie games and old games)

This is just plain wrong, mind explaining what you're talking about?

Nobody forces you to distribute your package only through specific distros (as I said at the beginning). You can make a package that is distro independent with self-contained scripts and installers.

This point is rather ignorant and can be heavily disproved by pointing out that OSX is a Unix certified architecture (more than Linux actually) and this has nothing to do with it.

We aren't talking about finding a windows alternative (for that, you're better off using OSX/Linux with wine than ReactOS), we're talking about supporting the Linux platform and the games that are already existing on Linux. It's not magic, there are games out there which already work on Linux.

ReactOS is at an alpha status at the moment and last time I tried it (few months ago) it didn't even support more than 512MB of RAM. Saying that any game can run on that OS is just false. Might as well target Minix, Plan9 and Haiku while you're at it. Also ReactOS has no marketshare whatsoever.