Thank you everybody, I went with Heroic Launcher
I’d like to log into my GoG account and click on “install game” from within the game store without having to manually download the installer, manually install the game, and then add it to the game store to act as a launcher (like steam does). Seems to defeat the purpose of a game store.
Purchasing the game on the web is fine, it’s more the game management aspect I’m looking for. Does that exist?
GOG is a store. What you’re wanting is some frontend app to do downloads and act as a launcher.
GOG has some frontend, GOG Galaxy, but GOG doesn’t do a Linux release of it.
I personally dislike using Steam’s client as launcher, and don’t like that model (I’ve got better tools to launch programs and would just as soon not have Steam interjecting itself and would rather not even having it run). One of GOG’s selling points is that once you buy a game and download the installer, you don’t have any dependency on GOG — if the company goes under, you still can play the games.
For GoG, there’s a command-line program, lgogdownloader, that can, among other things, batch-download all your games, but I don’t believe that it will auto-install them (and in fact, I don’t know if all of the games on GoG have installers that can do headless installation). The open-source, command-line downloader and not having to run software from the company is more-or-less my ideal model, though I can understand wanting to do a headless install.
EDIT: It does look like GOG Galaxy can run under WINE, which is how you’d likely run most of the games you’re obtaining from GOG, so you could just use the Windows client in WINE. I suppose that you’d download the Windows client here if you wanted to do that.
EDIT2: The Wine AppDB entry says that you will need corefonts (a collection of Microsoft fonts) to run GOG Galaxy, so if you’ve never used WINE, setting up a 64-bit WINE environment in ~/.wine and installing corefonts in it will look something like this (on a Debian-family system):
Download the GOG Galaxy binary for Windows from its website.
And then run it:
Uh, have you not heard of Heroic? It’s by far the most comfortable method to install and run GOG games on Linux. I think under the hood it uses lgogdownloader or some other CLI GOG downloader.
To reiterate the above:
I don’t want a GUI “game launcher”, thanks. I have a number of general-purpose, more-capable systems for launching programs. Not Lutris, not Heroic, not any program that requires throwing up a window and is intended to just start games. I don’t have a “word processor launcher” or a “web browser launcher”, and I don’t need a “game launcher”.
I’d dump the Steam client if a number of Steam games didn’t require it to be running for their DRM to work. Hell, for a few games, like Caves of Qud, which don’t rely on Steam for DRM, where I want to run the thing on other systems and don’t want Steam even installed, I do exactly that.
EDIT: Sorry, guess I was a little snappish, if you were just suggesting it WRT OP’s concerns. Having to use the Steam client to launch Steam games has been something of a pet peeve of mine; ordinarily, one can configure pretty much whatever one wants on Linux, but Steam’s a closed-source black box, and the source of several of my “my computer doesn’t do precisely what I want” irritations.
You may not want one, but the OP is specifically adding about one. So while your post may work for you, it is not what was asked about.