Yeah, I understand all that, but first of all I have 4 gaming systems, 3 of them boot straight to Steam big picture (Desktop plugged to my living room TV, Steam Deck and Steam Frame), while I could have my gaming laptop for something different it just makes it easier to use the same on all systems, plus I would miss on cloud saves which make it seamless to switch from one system to another.

But here's the thing, to run things in Lutris I have to set it up myself, and setting it up with GoG downloaded installers or pirated versions is essentially the same, so what exactly is GoG providing me that I can't get by pirating? Am I only paying them for the legality of it?

Yup, I can totally see that logic, but as someone who's using Linux as their main OS for a long while being able to easily play the game on my system is more important than most instances of DRM (although always on DRM is not acceptable to me). My reasoning is that if I have to jump through hoops to get the game to run on my machine by for example having to setup a wine prefix and figure out things for it I'm not paying for that game, if they don't care for me as a customer, then why should I pay them?.

For a long time that meant only native games got my money, and back then I used to buy stuff from GoG as all being the same their no DRM policy is better than Valve's. But Valve invested heavily on Wine and Proton, which not only improved my experience inside their store but also outside of it, so I see a lot of return in giving them money, whereas GoG I'm getting the same experience from them than from the pirate bay or whatever kids are using nowadays, so I don't see a reason to give them money.

All of that being said, when GoG Galaxy comes to Linux, and if they integrate wine with it in a useful way, I plan on having a look at the old games catalog and possibly throw some money their way to encourage both Linux and DRM free support, but nowadays rebuilding my game library elsewhere would be prohibitly expensive, not to mention the pains of having to deal with multiple launchers, systems, etc.

I don't disagree with most what you said about Steam, I really wish they were more strict about DRM and disclosure of it, I think they have a lot to improve in that area, and you are absolutely right that just because there's a workaround doesn't mean it's not a problem.

In fact the only thing I disagree with is this:

Meanwhile you can buy from GOG without such hassles or risks that you have when buying games from Steam to make sure they're free of nasty DRM

You do know GoG allows DRM on their store, right? And that you don't have curators or similar to have a workaround, your only hope is to go through this thread https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singleplayer_games_with_drm/page1 to find if it's listed there.

I'm not anti-GoG or pro-steam, I wish both of them to succeed because I want to play DRM free games on my Linux machine, but I feel that GoG gets a lot of good propaganda for things they're only doing marginally better than steam.

It does, kinda, there are warnings for games that require certain things like kernel level anti-cheat or 3d party accounts, although I think they should have an extra one for always on DRM which is particularly nasty and troublesome for people on a steam deck so there's reason for them to warn on that.

But also, you have 14 days to return a game as long as you have less than 2h of play, if this is a major concern for you you can run the game offline and ensure it works otherwise refund it. There are also unofficial curators run by community that allow you to quickly see if a game is in those lists which is a nice community way to ensure weird cases are captured. Still would be nice to have more official stance from Valve on hard DRMs, hopefully with GoG coming to Linux they might have to care more about it, but we'll see.

It took them over a decade to implement the most requested feature which could have probably accomplished in one afternoon as GoG Galaxy is an electron app, and they didn't, I'm not holding my breath expecting them to be competent.

It'll almost certainly have something like this or there's no point in them making it at all.

GoG has native games for Linux, at the time the feature was initially requested to GoG Proton wasn't a thing and we had to do janky stuff to run windows games on Steam. I'm not saying GoG won't do it, I'm saying people are assuming it will just because everyone else does, which might not be true. Hopefully it is, but it's just an assumption.

First of all let's get something out of the way, I don't think Valve is doing anything to be nice, they're doing it because it's in their best interest, however their best interest happens to align with mine.

I don't expect GoG to do what Valve is doing, but porting Galaxy to Linux has been the most requested feature on GoG for a LONG while, and honestly it's not that hard to do, especially considering they have a Mac version. If they can't even dedicate one programmer for one month to implement the most requested feature for their app, and allow me to play their games on my "steam machine" then they don't really care about my money.

GoG doesn't produce hardware, so that's a moot point.

Absolutely, otherwise the game wouldn't truly be DRM free. There are some games that have a different version on Steam that on GoG where the game crashes if it can't find steam running, IMO those are badly programmed games and while it is technically DRM I would put those into a category of unintentional DRM, and there is an easy crack which is to replace the steam library they ship with with a fake one that replies as if it were steam. And while easy to do I would not call those DRM free.

I know it's theoretically easy, but that doesn't mean GoG will do it.

It's working now, thanks.

Just FIY, I'm not the person who asked about the filters, using them was very intuitive for me, but I expected the results when I click on a location to be filtered as well and when I came to say nice project and suggest that change I saw the comment above where you mentioned it.

I feel like this and DRM are the two things people point out as GoG's benefits, but first of all GoG also sells you a license, so it's EXACTLY the same as Steam. The "difference" is in the other point, because without DRM games bought on GoG can be backed up and installed again without needing GoGs approval, but this ignores two HUGE caveats:

• GoG also allows DRM on their store, with some games having DRM for DLCs or extra content.
• Steam doesn't require DRM, so all games that are DRM free on GoG are most likely also DRM free on Steam.

All in all this means that in regards to ownership morally GoG is essentially the same as Valve, they just have better PR about it.

PS: To give credit where it's due, GoG is a lot more restrictive with what DRM it allows, and you can expect most of the game you bought to be playable without DRM there. However I feel that allowing me to play on my libre OS is a lot more morally significant than the difference between those two DRM stances.