One of the few criticisms I had of GOG was that they backtracked on Linux support. Originally, they had native versions for Witcher 1 and 2. Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk, while they run perfectly fine on Proton, never got a port, and they had a Linux version of GOG Galaxy on the roadmap for years, then took it down after never getting anywhere with it. This isn't a major problem given you can easily use third party clients and offline installers, but it is sad to see them backtrack at the time Steam really took the reins with making Linux gaming actually a thing.
If I had to be charitable to GOG (and CD Projekt Red by extension), I think they found out the hard way that Linux absolutely fucking
sucks at long-term API/ABI stability. I can't attest to Witchers 1+3, let alone Cyberpunk, ever having Linux-native versions. Maybe they did in the past, but certainly not now. What I
can attest to is the native Linux binary for Witcher 2 being, quite literally,
unplayable in $current_year.
What ultimately happened is that the Linux version of Witcher 2 used GTK2 for its launcher... and GTK2 went EOL at the end of 2024. The Flathub runtime environment also went EOL not too long after. The
only way to play Witcher 2 on Linux without gouging your eyes out over toolkit incompatibilities
is the Windows version via Proton. To be fair, Linux ports ain't all bad. Hollow Knight is an example of a Linux port that's done exceptionally well. But expecting Team Cherry's QA out of CD Project Red is asking for way too much in $current_year.
The lack of a Linux-native GOG Galaxy does suck ass... but I'd argue that GOG Galaxy would only be worthwhile if there were enough GOG games with proper multiplayer functionality and adequate server-side anticheat. As it stands: even the games they share with Steam that have multiplayer components (re: Doom 2016) have the multiplayer functionality completely gutted because the GOG team more or less lack the infrastructure to facilitate PvP, let alone co-op.
If you're stuck in pure single player for GOG games, you might as well skip GOG Galaxy altogether in favour of Heroic Games Launcher. At least that launcher is Linux-native and aggregates multiple storefronts and libraries into a single interface.
