Fora

Well, it's not done yet, and they'll focus on Ubuntu and Mint, but still, that's an awesome news !

http://www.gog.com/news/gogcom_soon_on_more_platforms

Very good news! I am very curious on how they will support the games (with a bundled wine version?), and of course, which games!

Agreed! I have seen several posts on different sites about this and everyone seems to think GOG will start with DOS games.
But I'm excited because it just means more DRM free games for us.
Yay!

Some games available on gog.com have linux versions.
Older games that were packaged using DOSBox or ScumVM can also be easily ported to linux version of DOSBox and ScumVM.

Exactly, so there is already a lot of games to make available now.
But hopefully they can continue the Linux push for us and get more old games ported to Linux.
I think that is the main problem with PC games. Developers won't take the time to re-compile games and port them to Linux because its not worth the money or the support, but some how GOG has been able to get developers to make their games Windows 7 & 8 compatible and DRM free.
So I hope this will spark some interest so we can get more games running in Linux natively instead of using Wine as a workaround.

They just opened their Linux services, earlier than announced:

http://www.gog.com/news/gogcom_now_supports_linux

Thats GREAT!  I'm glad they had so much success that they could release early!

What a good sign for Linux gaming!

I have a small downside to report about the usage of GOG using Linux; It doesn't concern native Linux installers (I haven't tried many yet), but on the contrary the Windows installers: it seems that some recently updated installer generate lots of Runtime errors under Wine; And the /nogui argument, that's currently no longer officially supported (according to the support), generate its own set of Runtime errors.

So, from now on a game nicely rated in the AppDB, installed using either the original installer or some older GOG installer, is no longer "guaranteed" to install fine.

Now way!

I've had a few errors with random GOG games, but for the most part they would still install and run fine.
I just testing STALKER Clear Sky and it ran perfectly!

I hope this isn't going to be a further problem

Taken from http://www.gog.com/forum/general/on_gnulinux_has_anyone_be_able_to_extract_the_rar_innosetup_installers/post116:

Gowor: "Hello,

-Rars are used for convenience, as they have some features that the old archives lack. For example when making a test build of the game, it's faster for us to update the archives than to repack them from scratch when making small changes for testers.

-Watermarking the installers with username is not planned. One, for ideological reasons, two it's not really technologically feasible.

-Yes, the archives are password-protected. Here's why:

The supported way of installing the games is by using the Installer, which apart from unpacking the files, also creates registry entries, shortcuts, compatibility fixes etc. We want to avoid having the situation, when user will see a unprotected rar file, download and unpack it, and get a "broken" installation, because he didn't use the installer.
There were situations, when users would download just a single part of the installer, or try to unrar it manually (because apparently some browsers detect our new archives as rar files), or even try to open the .bin files with the VLC Video Player.
In such a situation I think it's better to give immediate "it won't work that way" message, rather than allow someone to make a "partial" installation, which may or may not work, without any information.

Another reason - I want to avoid the situation where someone tampers with the archives (let's say adding malware, or some illegal content), and uploads the modified version on torrents. I don't want the GOG Installer installing anything else than it was supposed to, and it doesn't matter how it was obtained.

The Installer is designed mostly for reliability and ease of use for any user. And it's intentionally designed as it is.

Mind you - if you are using the supported installation mode, you don't have to enter the password anywhere. Nor is it in any way dependent on username, or hardware, or anything else. It's more or less hardcoded into the installer (I see you guys already figured out how), as much as the decompression algorithm. You can still use the installer exactly as you could since the beginning of GOG, and install your games wherever, whenever, and however many times you want. It doesn't detect where was it downloaded from either. That hasn't changed at all.

We don't really support installing the game by manually unpacking the archives (for whatever reason you do that). On the other hand, I see you already figured out the algorithm for obtaining the password, so you are still able to do as much. I'm not going to say "Hey, good job hacking into our software guys!", but I'm not going to try and make the password harder either."

No Wine oriented answer, but at least a clearer view of the motivations behind the switch of compression used.

Has the bug been reported to WineHQ?

There's no entry for the GOG installer by itself in the AppDB (only for the GOG.com downloader), which may make sense because it's not a separate program; So for example the bug #32451 has been first reported for the GOG release of NeverWinter Nights II, I think. So it's hard to tell, it's all scattered.

From some discussion on IRC (with SpeakerToMeat), a workaround may be to install native crypt32 library (haven't checked yet).

Also there's still some hope that GOG will step back, as it's unclear how many people there were actually informed of this modification...

So far GOG installer continues to work even with the passwords

I have the current version of Assassin's Creed (GOG) and checked the .bin files, they definitely have passwords. Strange because everyone is talking about RAR files, but there are only .bin files.  Not sure why...

So I installed Assassin's Creed with the GOG installer in PlayOnLinux with wine 1.6.2 and the game runs fine. There were a few errors in the installation, but it didn't seem to affect anything.

Some good news, taken from http://www.gog.com/forum/general/on_gnulinux_has_anyone_be_able_to_extract_the_rar_innosetup_installers/post470:

"We’ve heard your concerns regarding this solution and we do agree it could have been better. Although the same could probably be said about many other answers to this problem, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do better for our community. To that end we will be removing the mentioned archive protection from the select Windows installers that had it until a better solution, both technically and philosophically, is ready. Please continue sharing your suggestions regarding such a solution in this topic - your feedback is very appreciated. "

(and then some, but you can go read the rest by following the link...)

Awesome!  I'm so happy GOG decided to hear their community and support us!

Some games will appear "unbundled" in users' accounts, so that will probably be more install scripts to adjust...

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/important_notice_unbundling_games