The team behind Minigalaxy, a custom Good Old Games (GOG) client for Linux, has dropped a new update with a number of tweaks and an upgrade to the Windows game installation experience.
Since the GOG Galaxy client for Windows and Mac doesn’t have an official port for Linux, playing your GOG library on a Linux device is a challenge without a third-party client like Minigalaxy. Even more challenging is running a Windows-exclusive that requires a compatibility layer like Wine to play. This update aims to ease that challenge.
The big change is that the process of installing a game with Wine has been overhauled. Minigalaxy first attempts to perform an unattended install, which can be a godsend if you don’t want to fool with old installation wizards through a compatibility layer. You just click the download button in Minigalaxy and wait for the progress bar to complete. If Minigalaxy is unable to handle that, though, it’ll hand the reins over to you. The developers note that if this happens, you need to leave the install directory “c:\game” untouched to make sure the installation goes smoothly.
I got the update promptly on my Garuda Linux desktop and was able to play around with it. I had a mixed experience, though. The first game I tried to play with it, Star Wars Battlefront II Classic, installed just fine without any errors, but it failed to launch. I’m going to have to try some launch parameters to make that work. Frostpunk and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion installed and played just fine though, with almost no interaction from me except pressing the download button.
I’m not out of options though. Other clients like Lutris and Heroric Games Launcher have their own ways of automating and generally easing the operation of installing Windows games on Linux, with support for GOG libraries too. The nice thing about Minigalaxy in particular is its simplicity. Those other clients combine your libraries from other storefronts like Epic Games Store and Humble Bundle into one heaping pile of games with a whole dashboard of tweaks and customizations available. Meanwhile, Minigalaxy is focused only on making your GOG library run. A simple collection of toggles let you enable useful add-ons like MangoHUD and GameMode, though you need to install those on your system separately before they’ll work.
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The release notes for version 1.3.2 also promise that Minigalaxy will create desktop shortcuts for games that rely on Wine, and with unique icons when GOG provides them. In my testing, none of that happened for any of the games I installed, including a native Linux game, Beat Cop. I’m not sure if this was a permissions issue or what. It might have been simply a casualty of running a bleeding edge Linux distro like Gaurda Linux where the desktop environment (Plasma 6.3 in this case) and applications haven’t been thoroughly tested for compatibility. It doesn’t bother me that much because I prefer launching from the application menu anyway, and those showed up just fine.
There are also some odds and ends in this update too worth mentioning:
- Bug fix for downloads that weren’t properly resuming after being interrupted beyond the 50% mark
- A cleaned up UI for third party logins
- Blanks are now allowed in game arguments and variables if you quote them as you would in a shell
To learn more, you can read the full release notes at the official Minigalaxy 1.3.2 GitHub release page. If you want to try out Minigalaxy, it’s likely in your distro’s software repositories. Looking at the Minigalaxy packaging status, version 1.3.2 at the time of writing is only packaged in the AUR, Fedora Rawhide, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Solus repositories. If your distro doesn’t have access to those, you can still get 1.3.2 as a standalone DEB file or, if you have the skills, install it from source using that GitHub release page.
Via: GamingOnLinux
