Hell yeah!
Literally the top requested feature in the forums, then they cleared it out and it became …the top requested feature in the forums
I had been using Heroic Launcher to manage my GOG library on Linux. It works well enough, but an official Linux native GOG client would certainly be welcome.
Great news tbh
Nice to see GOG putting real effort into Linux support. Modernizing a native client is exactly the kind of work that actually benefits users long-term.
imagine if they stopped using CEF.
I love this! I love that it’s getting more attention and cross-platform support.
I just wish it wasn’t yet another launcher, and that all these companies got together to develop the one Open Source version everyone writes adapters for. Galaxy, at the time it was released, promised to be a way to have all of them… and then I discovered playnite (which worked better and has more options) and I cannot help but wonder if GOG’s efforts wouldn’t be better directed that way. Specially since my understanding is that the tool is undergoing a rewrite for cross-platform support.
Yep, I guess the way you said it was more diplomatic than mine because with (I believe at least) the same message I’m getting downvoted for asking for more open source but you don’t. I’m clearly missing something.
Edit: my bet is that you mentioned Playnite thus demonstrating legit alternatives do exist, whereas I didn’t so maybe people imagined I just complained asking for something impossible because they didn’t not it already existed. I should have mentioned Lutris.
Upvoted because its gog. :)
there’s a lot to be excited for, but
Job requirements
[…]- Active use of AI tools in daily development workflows, and enthusiasm for helping the team increase adoption
ew.
That’s every company right now
Ew.
hell nah
It’s so weird, i read this in a bunch of jon listings nowadays. How the fuck is it a requirement?!?! You should be fluent in CPP, but also please outsource your brain and encourage the team to do so as well. People are weird man.
The future looks to involve a mixture of AI and traditional development. There are things I do with AI that I could never touch the speed of with traditional development. But the vast majority of dev work is just traditional methods with maybe an AI rubber duck and then review before opening the PR to catch the dumb mistakes we all make sometimes. There is a massive difference between a one-off maintenance script or functional skeleton and enterprise code that has been fucked up for 15 years and the AI is never going to understand why you can’t just do the normal best practice thing.
A good developer will be familiar enough with AI to know the difference, but it’ll be a tool they use a couple times a month (highly dependent on the job) in big ways and maybe daily in insignificant ways if they choose.
Companies want a staff prepared for that state, not dragging their heels because they refuse to learn. I’ve been at this for thirty year’s and I’ve had to adapt to a number of changes I didn’t like. But like a lot of job skills we’ve had to develop over the years — such as devops — it’ll be something that you engage for specific purposes, not the whole job.
Even when the AI bubble does burst, AI won’t go away entirely. OpenAI isn’t the only provider and local AI is continuing to close the gap in terms of capability and hardware. In that environment, it may become even more important to know when the tool is a good fit and when it isn’t.
I am aware of that. I occasionally use AI for coding myself if I see fit.
Just the fact that active use of AI tools is listed under job requirement and that I have seen that in more than a few job listings rubs me the wrong way and would definitively be the first question in the interview to clarify what the extent of that is. I just don’t wanna deal with pipelines that break because they are partially rely on AI or an code base nobody knows their way around because nobody actually has written it themselves.
Frankly that’s why I think it’s important for AI centrists to occupy these roles rather than those who are all in. I’m excited about AI and happy to apply it where it makes sense and also very aware of its limitations. And in the part of my role that is encouraging AI adoption, critical thinking is one of the things I try my hardest to communicate.
My leadership is targeting 40-60% efficiency gains. I’m targeting 5-10% with an upward trajectory as we identify the kinds of tasks it is specifically good at within this environment. I expressed mild skepticism about that target to my direct manager during my interview (and he agreed) but also a willingness to do my best and a proven track record of using AI successfully.
I would suggest someone like yourself is perhaps well-suited to that particular duty — though whether the hiring manager sees it that way is another issue.
It means that the parent company has major investors in the LLM space.
CDPR is a major john in LLM?
It’s a publicly traded company, isn’t it? Most likely there is some investor in the CEO’s ear asking him to push this down on all staff… so they come up with bright ideas like putting silly “requirements” like this in their job descriptions as well. And in any case, AI investors are so desperate these days, chances are that they’re doing everything they can to create general LLM FOMO in a similarly desperate push to increase adoption.
That’s what I’m guessing at least. Even to me it sounds a little like a conspiracy theory, but then again these people have a lot of influence.
GOG is now owned by Michał Kiciński, one of the original founders. He can do whatever he wants.
And no, it’s not to use his staff in a secret evil plot to gain third hand investment returns by investing in the current hype cycle and then hiring staff to use that investment…
Yeah, what does GOG know?
The real source of wisdom is social media users who approach a topic with bad faith, outrage farming framing. I mean just look at the upvotes, and you can easily tell how right you are, it’s basically science.
It’s lemmy. Average user is more technical than the average investor.
Also we all know by “AI tools” they just mean chatbots, and they are a known scam by now.
Have upvotes disabled so i don’t know how many upvotes it got. I just pointed out that it’s weird that it’s under the requirements, which sounds like they would require you to use training wheels. Which is normally not something you say there. I do not understand what your problem is.
I’m sorry the only way you know how to write code is with an LLM holding your hand, but I believe if you really devote yourself to it you could learn to be a real programmer. Good luck!
Why did you attack the commenter personally? Are you not able to defend the idea without stooping so low?
Clearly you didn’t read the conversation because they were less inaulting and dumb than the peraon they replied to. Why are you so interested in defending trolls?
Why are you so interested in defending trolls?
The irony here is rich.
Yea it is, mr troll.
And we open the book of troll arguments to chapter 1: Ad hominem
Keep going, it really makes you look like the rational one.
Maybe try a red herring next, or a straw man those are always popular.
They know some things I’ll give you that. But pattern recognition tells me for this example it’s more likely they’re wrong.
Maybe. We can’t say, there is zero information there that even hints at how or how much they use AI.
It isn’t like they’re saying something specific like ‘Must be able to use Cursor, Mercurial and be able to direct multi-agent workflows’.
That bullet point read like it is more there to include a hot keyword on job searching sites than an actual specification that describes the job.It’s kind of like including the word in your comment, so that you grab all of the bot upvotes and can farm outrage in a way that is objectively off-topic and unrelated to the actual post, which is about GOG moving to support Linux, not and not about AI.
It’d be one thing if there was something specific about the job related to AI, or if anyone involved in these comments had actually said anything of substance other than, literally, ‘ew’.
So, to my pattern recognition, this looks like every other ‘ai bad’ thread shoehorned into posts and full of toxic attacks while being light on actual discussion of the topic in the OP.
No wonder just one headcount. .
You are not competitive as a programmer if you disown llm auto complete today. But for a lead dev, it’s not that important. Nobody actually vibe codes professionally, but equally nobody on the lean street disown the cli llm tools
I mean yes, but maybe if you can interview in good faith, that’s not what becomes part of the job.
“I saw here that the use of AI is required. I’m willing to compromise and use AI for some workflows, but I’m skeptical of wide scale adoption. I think its potentially bad for the long term code base maintenance and stability, which is what GOG is founded on. If I find that it’s truly helpful in code writing, then I’ll continue to work it into my larger workload, but do keep in mind that the Linux community as a whole is more technical than other OS consumers and this will be bad PR.”
It’s sad that this is basically everywhere these days, and employers will weigh your performance review based on whether you’re using AI and how well you’re using it. It’s terrible.
They’ll change their tune when a few of their new workflows go rogue and auto commit prs it shouldn’t and cause build issues.
We’ve had multiple instances of AI slop being automatically released to production without any human review, and some of our customers are very angry about broken workflows and downtime, and the execs are still all-in on it. Maybe the tune is changing to, “well, maybe we should have some guardrails”, but very slowly.
The incident above I mentioned was the final straw but I’ve slowly seen the enthusiasm for LLMs start to whittle away.
It’s still the shiny new toy that everyone must play with but we went from “drop your entire roadmap for AI” to “eh maybe we don’t scrap all UIs just yet”
I have a feeling it’s gonna drop more from there.
This is a “big part” of my job. In five months what I’ve accomplished is adding AI usage to jira along with a way to indicate how many story points it wound up saving or costing. Let’s see how this plays out.
If AI collapses as many expect it to, this job will still be there without that requirement.
I hope the bubble pops soon, and only smaller and more sustainable models stay
agreed
Yeah, self-hosted open-source models seem okay, as long as their training data is all from the public domain.
Hopefully RAM becomes cheap as fuck after the bubble pops and all these data centers have to liquidate their inventory. That would be a nice consolation prize, if everything else is already fucked anyway.
Unfortunately, server RAM and GPUs aren’t compatible with desktops. Also, NVidia have committed to releasing a new GPU every year, making the existing ones worth much less. So unless you’re planning to build your own data centre with slightly out-of-date gear - which would be folly, the existing ones will be desperate to recoup any investment and selling cheap - then it’s all just destined to become a mountain of e-waste.
I read I think just last week but for sure in the last month that someone has created an AI card that lowers power usage by 90%. (I know that’s really vague and leaves a lot of questions.) It seems likely that AI-specific hardware and graphics hardware will diverge — I hope.
I think it’s called an inferencing chip. I read about it a few months ago.
Basically, the way it was explained, the most energy-intensive part of AI is training the models. Once training is complete, it requires less energy to make inferences from the data.
So the idea with these inferencing chips is that the AI models are already trained; all they need to do now is make inferences. So the chips are designed more specifically to do that, and they’re supposed to be way more efficient.
I kept waiting to see it in devices on the consumer market, but then it seemed to disappear and I wasn’t able to even find any articles about it for months. It was like the whole thing vanished. Maybe Nvidia wanted to suppress it, cause they were worried it would reduce demand for their GPUs.
At one point I had seen a smaller-scale company listing laptops for sale with their own inferencing chips, but the webpage seems to have disappeared. Or at least the page where they were selling it.
Maybe that surplus will lay the groundwork for a solarpunk blockchain future?
I don’t know if I understand what blockchain is, honestly. But what if a bunch of indie co-ops created a mesh network of smaller, more sustainable server operations?
It might not seem feasible now, but if the AI bubble pops, Nvidia crashes spectacularly, data centers all need to liquidate their stock, and server compute becomes basically viewed as junk, then it might become possible…
I’m just trying to find a silver lining, okay?
Like AI, blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. Both have their uses but are generally part of overcomplicated, expensive solutions which are better done with more traditional techniques.
Maybe I didn’t mean blockchain, cause I’m still not really certain what it is. I mean like the fediverse itself, or a mesh network, where a bunch of hobbyist self-hosting their own servers can federate as a system of nodes for a more distributed model.
Instead of all the compute being hoarded in power-hungry data centers; regular folks, hobbyists, researchers, indie devs, etc., would be able to run more powerful simulations, meta-analyses, renderings, etc., and then pool their data/collaborate on projects, and ultimately create a more efficient and intelligently guided use of the compute instead of simply “CEO says generate more profit! 24/7 overdrive!!!”
At the very least, a surplus of cheap RAM would expand the computing capabilities of everyone who isn’t a greedy corporation with enough money to buy up all the expensive RAM.
I wonder if the Server gpus can be used for other tasks than computing llms
I would imagine any program running simulations, rendering environments, analyzing metadata, and similar tasks would be able to use it.
It would be useful for academic researchers, gamers, hobbyists, fediverse instances. Basically whatever capabilities they have now, they would be able to increase their computing power for dirt cheap.
Someone could make a fediverse MMO. That could be cool, especially when indie devs start doing what zuck never could with VR.
Google Stadia wasn’t exactly a responding success…
From a previous job in hydraulics, the computational fluid dynamics / finite element analysis that we used to do would eat all your compute resource and ask for more. Split your design into tiny cubes, simulate all the flow / mass balance / temperature exchange / material stress calculations for each one, gain an understanding of how the part would perform in the real world. Very easily parallelizable, a great fit for GPU calculation. However, it’s a ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’ industry, and the AI bubble is currently ‘tens of trillions’ deep.
Yes, they can be used for other tasks. But we’ve just no use for the amount that’s been purchased - there’s tens of thousands of times as much as makes any sense.
Agreed, AI has uses but c-suite execs have no idea what they are and are paying millions to get their staff using them in hopes of finding what those uses are. In reality they are making things worse with no tangible benefit because they are all scared that someone will find this imaginary golden goose first.
No mention of open source though.
Steam isn’t open source either. Bringing GoG galaxy to linux will make it easier for linux gamers to buy and install DRM free games. The games won’t be open source either, that’s not the issue here.
at least partial source availible would be nice
not a programmer so idk if i’m talking blunders here, but i’d love it if gog just released their api so that people can make fully featured 3rd party clients. i’d love to have an adwaita gog client that looks native to my gnome system.
Not a blunder, technically its possible. You just wouldn’t want to do it as company policy. The reasons off the top of my head:
- user account security (even if you do secure oauth, if you don’t control the client, you cant guarantee whats happening to the game files or user account data once it leaves your servers
- resource exploitation (3rd party clients can do anything… even keep downloading games 24/7, automatically, to degrade performance of your system)
- service quality (you can’t ensure a client not published by you will be able to download and provide all game files and updates correctly whenever needed. this pisses off your customers and your partners - even when you had nothing to do with it since you don’t control the client software)
This can all be tightly controlled and locked down, but you’ll just keep asking yourself why not just make your own client. Clients for product delivery are best left as something you provide yourself. Nothing is stopping them from allowing complete reskins from the community though (like steam used to have).
Steam isn’t open source either
…and? I wish Steam also was open source but I don’t see how that’s relevant here.
We’re discussing about a position for someone who probably likes, or at least understand, open source because that’s the motivation for most people when they consider Linux. It’s important to highlight what it is and what it is not, unfortunately.
There are open source games too, just to give a random examples GCompris is quite amazing and it keeps on growing. Countless examples on https://itch.io/games/tag-open-source
What is the point of this very community? Is it “just” to play (and if so, one can “just” launch Steam on desktop or their SteamDeck, BTW AFAIK Steam does not suggest DRMs, it’s up to the game dev) or rather is it to play better, whatever that might mean? I personally do not believe promoting proprietary software (especially when working ones already exist) helps go further but you might disagree. Can you please explain then WHY more proprietary launchers and games is good?
There are many many more motivations for Linux
I didn’t say it was the only motivation, but even if I did, can you please give examples and address the question I did ask?
I like Galaxy.
Curious though, modernise it? It’s pretty new as it is, did it come out the gate as old? Ha
You have no idea what kind of technical debt is hiding below the surface. I don’t either, but any non-trivial application has some, and hasn’t Galaxy been around for a while? It tends to accumulate.
Either way, I see it as a good sign when a company takes the time to modernize a piece of software, and moving to linux sounds like a great opportunity to do that.
We can see it if we use the API to extend the app. It’s not that bad, but the integrations are a pain for the user
The integrations are mostly all broken. I had to stop using it.
Myeah. Makes it sound like they built a new client quickly without future proofing it because the older client was hard to work with, only to create a new hard to work with pile of code. Rewriting software rarely works out to be the silver bullet you imagined it to be. In my experience taking something crappy and piecemeal make focused attempts at improving small parts at a time.
There are cases of “architecture by happenstance” where a rewrite is your only path forward ultimately. Developer understanding of the specific business needs often evolves over time and poor choices were made in the beginning. You can rearchitect it in place over 5 years or you can do it in six months. It helps to have a leader with a strong vision and sense of where things went wrong the last time, though. If it’s just a bunch of “this app sucks. We need to rewrite it in .Net/NodeJS/etc.” then you’re doomed to fail in all the same ways.
I
took place inbailed on a Java -> .Net migration where they were literally copying and changing syntax. It could’ve been a singular opportunity to fix a bunch of things, but was instead a waste of money and probably 60 developer years. I wonder if they ever finished…
It’s kind of sluggish. I don’t know if that is the case but it feels like an Electron application. Basically a website running in Chrome with an integrated backend.
I haven’t used the GOG client (might once they build a Linux one), but it can’t be worse than EGS, right?
Steam uses Electron and manages to make it… Not great, not terrible.
EGS runs Chromium inside Unreal Engine 4. Yes, you heard that right. A browser inside a game engine just to run a god damn game launcher.
Steam includes a browser for the store. But the user UI is native. And I think it’s fine.
Steam is extremely not fine as a ui, and you know it. It’s just great in the backend (probably because it’s not Electron…)
I actually like it. Especially the big picture mode on SteamDeck.
Steam is completely browser based, if you scroll on your own games page, the “Steam Client WebHelper” uses all the CPU, the process steamwebhelper.exe sits in cef.win64, aka Chromium Embeded Framework.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework
While it embeds the browser, I don’t think it uses the web tech to draw the UI.
It bundled with a bunch of GTK and SDL libs.
I wonder what they’ve been doing in the meantime when a Linux native client was the most requested feature for so long.
GOG was recently bought from CDPR and is now owned by one of the co-founders, if I remember right. The focus shift towards finally giving the bare minimum of fucks about Linux likely has something to do with that.
CDPR is the game dev studio. Their parent company, CD Projekt was who owned GOG. CDPR had nothing to do with it.
Right, thanks. I always get them mixed up
Okay, in other words: I won’t be buying any more Steam games 🐳
Got enough stuff in my library to last until GoG starts working nicely enough on Linux 🐧
You don’t need GOG galaxy to install and run GOG games. In fact you shouldn’t if you care about keeping your games.
That’s some kind of fallacy, I am sure. Just because I want to own my games I must not care about the hassle of installing them? False equivalence maybe?
Have you tried Heroic Games Launcher and found it to be a hassle?
Currently happily using Heroic to manage GOG games. But, I still welcome GOG putting in effort to make it a smooth experience.
You don’t need GOG galaxy to install and run GOG games. In fact you shouldn’t if you care about keeping your games.
Disagree. The fewer barriers to using a game the better. GOG offers full DRM free downloads regardless of Galaxy existing.
Yes and the DRM free part only matters if you keep a copy of the installer. Galaxy doesn’t do that.
the DRM free part only matters if you keep a copy of the installer. Galaxy doesn’t do that.
Why would that be relevant on Linux? WINE/Proton virtual environments are portable.
File compression, for starters. A dedicated installer is much easier to bring around.
tar -Jcf DIY-dedicated-installer.xz /path/to/wine/bottleNow you have a very portable, highly compressed file that is easy to move around.
File compression, for starters.
You can compress folders and entire file systems.
A dedicated installer is much easier to bring around.
For one game, maybe. For a bunch of games an automated backup that collects the entire library and save games is much more practical. There are several easy to use solutions, not to mention scripting if you want really fine grained control.
wait. why? i use gog galaxy for gog games. and steam for those there. should i be dloading offline installers for gog ones and saving them aside too?
If you want the benefit of a DRM game, yes. Otherwise you still don’t own the game. GOG has removed games from libraries before and will again at some point in the future.
Which games have they removed from libraries? Typically, these storefronts (including GOG) will remove games from sale, but not from the libraries of customers who already bought them. For instance, they deep discounted WarCraft 1 and 2 before Microsoft requested their delisting, but I’ve still got them in my library.
If you care this much about not using Steam, why would this be the deciding factor? I can play GoG games right now on Linux.
I tried that some time ago, and at least at that point it needed configuration to get up and running. It was a hassle. I have family that needs a lot of my time at the moment. Between August and December I could find less than 10 days where I was able to decide by myself what I do after workdays or on weekends.
I’m not going to spend those precious minutes configuring any damn thing. Steam works out of the box. Now someone was just mentioning something called Heroic launcer. Sounds good. Wonder why Gog is not linking to it very visibly on its site if it works?
Yeah, I understand Linux gaming was not great until fairly recently. Heroic and Lutris have been around for a few years now as I understand it, though I admit I’m still new to the scene. Honestly though, in my experience, Steam still doesn’t just work in some cases, and I’ve admitted to myself that’s just going to be the Linux gaming experience. I check Proton DB before buying any game now.
Okay, in other words: I won’t be buying any more Steam games 🐳
So far this is only about one person and none of the ecosystem contributions to Mesa, SDL, Wine,…
Definitively better than nothing, though!
Well it’s a start
