The purple dot that used to be permanently shown, making it useless, then they "fixed" it and now it only shows up sometimes, so it's still useless? The "Forum Replies" page also doesn't show most replies. I was mostly thinking of email notifications though (I don't know if Steam actually has those, but any normal forum does).

(bolding mine) I know what you mean :|

I personally stopped paying attention to the purple dot years ago, and never missed it.

I don't have any issue with the "Forum Replies" page, which works as expected, if you understand how that is. There are rules it works by. You can also improve things, by making sure you enable the 'Favorite post' checkbox in each thread you want to follow. And if you enable a thread you create as a question, you get similar. The age (creation date) of a thread plays a part.

I personally would hate to get emails about forum replies, but each to their own. I don't know that there is much at the forum worthy of needing notification by email. If you require help from Support, you would usually get a PM and a notification for that near top right.

You can still get the profile background feature without the need for galaxy quite easily. It's as simple turning on a feature in the settings menu. The badge would required a custom executable inside the root folder of the drm free game that would require a log in to verify the completion of the game with gog's servers.

I'd prefer not having any contact with GOG's servers to verify completion. Why not just include these badges on purchase and if one wanted to verify if a person's completed the game, just ask them what they thought of the ending(s).

It could be cleared before too, if you waited to get a notification, such as for wishlisted titles going on sale or a chat message, and then cleared all notifications. And I'm yet to see moments when it doesn't show when there's a proper reply, but you need to know how the notification works, because somebody actually has to hit the reply button on one of your posts, if they manually add quote tags into their message it won't trigger.

And this would be made the function on Linux, pray tell how? I probably should have mentioned that first.