GOG is seeking a Senior Software Engineer with C++ experience to modernize the GOG GALAXY desktop client and spearhead its Linux development
9 months ago by mr_MADAFAKA to c/linux_gaming
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.
It means that the parent company has major investors in the LLM space.
CDPR is a major john in LLM?
GOG isn't under CDPR umbrella any more.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
We are past chatbots in programming for a while now. It's llms with tool calling capabilities now which work in an agentic loop. LLMs are extrapolators so the input context is important (extrapolating from missing information leads to hallucinations). With this workflow the LLM can construct its own context by using tools which leads to better results.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
If this is possible then your AI workflows are catastrophically broken. Even my dumbass company knows AI needs human supervision at all times.
Reddit and lemmy are so extreme on this topic it's impossible to express a nuanced opinion on the issue. AI is an undeniably powerful tool for any good programmer, but it needs to be used properly.
People being this irresponsible with it must work on software where there are no legal consequences if it breaks. As brainwashed as my company is on AI they would never allow us to create a process that releases unreviewed code.
Oh they are lol. Our company was full steam on it and is just now pumping the brakes as they’ve seen the chaos.
Don’t get me wrong. I think Gen AI can be, gasp, useful! It’s great in small pockets where you can handhold it and verify output. It’s great for cut through the noise that google and others have failed to address. It’s good at summarizing text.
I’m not so high on it being this massive reckoning that’s going to replace people. It’s just not built for that. Text prediction can only go so far and that’s all GenAI is.
Ew.
That's every company right now
No wonder just one headcount. .
Looking forward the the day GOG Galaxy becomes as unstable, slow, and annoying to use as the itch io launcher.
Wether you (or I) like it or not, Pandora's box has been opened. There is no future in software development without the use of LLMs.
K 👍
Thanks for making the job market slightly easier for the rest of us.
While this might be true, there's a big difference in using LLMs for auto-completions, second opinion PR reviews, and maybe mocking up some tests than using it to write actual production code. I don't see LLMs going away as a completion engine because they're really good at that, but I suspect companies that are using it to write production code are realizing/will soon realize that they might have security issues and that for a human to work on that codebase it would likely have to be thrown away entirely and redone, so using slop it only costed them time and money without any benefits. But we'll see how that goes, luckily I work at a company where managers used to be programmers so there's not much push for us to use it to generate code.
100% correct
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
It's hard for me to take these comments seriously. If people genuinely think AI is useless it's because they're using a bad model or they haven't actually tried and are just making stuff up.
It's extremely helpful for many different tasks, you just need to supervise it.
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
Because people want what they want, and it doesn't hurt you.
I would imagine that you'd still be able to use Heroic for GOG
These are just wrappers for Proton. Why do we need one more? Just contribute those resources to Heroic. My dream is to not need steam either. I want to run games like we did before. Just launch an executable file.
Heroic has some issues (i.e. Stellaris) that require some sort of annoying work around that doesn't really work sometimes. GOG could not have those issues.
Heroic is limited to just GOG and Epic, while GOG Galaxy on Windows is already trying to be a sort of everything launcher. This means GOG Galaxy on Linux would be more like a replacement of Lutris (which is no longer being developed) than Heroic.
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.
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.
Not using a launcher equals fewer barriers. GOG installers work out of the box with Wine. The whole point of GOG is literally that you can do all of that without restrictions like say... Being forced to use a launcher. So it's not a big deal if Galaxy for Linux isn't around.
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.
Have you tried Heroic Games Launcher and found it to be a hassle?
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.
It strikes me odd that Heroic doesn't want to be available with apt, though! It's even advertising that it is intentionally packaged in a way that duplicates pre-existing libraries – apparently to just take some extra place from my hard drive for fun?!
Doesn't really wake much trust in them caring about how to use a computer's resources. Whether one wants to be afraid of two applications sharing a library file or not should be left for the user to decide... And it's not very nice that there an increasing number of ways applications can be installed, and these clever people are supporting that development... How am I supposed to have any overlook over what's installed on my computer? This is starting to feel like Windows :(
I don't really believe it's very good for computer security that applications are installed without anything in the OS keeping track of whether they need security updates or not!
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!
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.
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.
Wake me up when it becomes a Foss launcher
That's a different indie project
No
Hell yeah!
My problem with gog, at least when downloading through heroic is that the download speeds as wildly slow.
Sometimes I have the same game on epic and gog, but the gog game will take hours longer to download compared to getting it from epic servers.
I think it’s because of my region. (South east Asia)
Additionally, they do not have regional pricing for the country where I live, so everything is much more expensive than it is on Steam.
So, once they offer regional pricing, I’ll switch over, even with slower download speeds.
In India, with 200mbps connection, I get good speed.
Regional pricing is still a big problem, otherwise I would have bought a few more games other than Witcher 2. Most of my library was built when they gave away a lot of adult games when the CC companies were trying to ban nudity from game stores, and one time I got free trial of Amazon Prime, so I got a few more games from Amazon Luna.
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.
just because a lot of stuff on linux is open source, and free... doesnt mean everything has to be in fact, i think that "mindset" is what have sorta slowed the overall adoptability of linux. (well, probably not but.. if the users expect all stuff to be free, then why would a company like adobe move to linux?)
Hi. I don't really have the juice to explain rn, but you should look up both "open source" and "free software". Free as in $ isn't mandatory, but transparent/extensible is kinda the whole point and adobe can fuck right off
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).
Things like heroic exist, so there is some form of open API.
If all you care about is installing and launching your games, then an GTK client already exists:
https://sharkwouter.github.io/minigalaxy/
Doesn't have galaxy's social features though
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?
Because it means more available games, and more options for gamers. Open source launchers would be great, but any launcher is better than no launcher at all, and first party support shows that GOG are taking Linux seriously as a platform that is worth investing time and resources in. This community is for people who A) Like Linux, and B) Like playing video games. Anything that allows you to play more video games on Linux is a good thing.
Rather they donate to Heroic.
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.
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 in bailed 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 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.
Steam uses Electron
Steam uses CEF, Chromium Embedded Framework, not Electron.
About time!
Great news tbh
Ok. $750k a year plus 2 months vacation annually. That's the other side of the offer, right?
Freakin finally
From a consumer perspective, if the choice is between C++ or nothing, or C++ and Electron, you take the application written in C++. They were probably already using C++, and most of the mature cross-platform UI toolkits are all designed around C or C++ anyways.
From a developer perspective... at least it's not JavaScript.
there is python, PyQt6 is crossplatform, runs anywhere, the biggest dependencies python and qt are often also used other things so likely to be installed already
And why would anyone with an existing C++ codebase use that when it’s just a bridge offering a subset of the original Qt6 library written in C++?
Same for Gtk and most other modern UI frameworks.
Yeah, C++ for a storefront? Why?
I remember hearing GOG does a lot of extra work to make their games run better, so then it makes sense that their programmers use C++.
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@lemmy.world
Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
This page can be subscribed to via RSS.
Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
No memes/shitposts/low-effort posts, please.
Resources
Help:
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- Are We Anticheat Yet?
- r/linux_gaming FAQ
- Fork of an earlier version of the above
- PCGamingWiki
- LibreGameWiki
Launchers/Game Library Managers:
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there’s a lot to be excited for, but
ew.
save