We’re also committing to supporting Vortex on SteamOS. We’ll be targeting vanilla Steam hardware like the Steam Deck and Steam Machine. We won’t be officially supporting any other configurations, but as Vortex is an open source project community developers will be free to extend support for their preferred Linux distros as they please.
I haven’t used it myself, but there Limo, a Nexus compatible mod manager for Linux. Seems competent.
Limo is closer to Mod Organizer than Nexus Mod Manager (honestly the only interesting part of the nexus one is the mod collections feature for “mod packs”)
I’ve been using Limo, on Bazzite, to mod Cyberpunk 2077, Kenshi, and Fallout NewVegas, on a SteamDeck, with 10s of gigs of mods for each … for 2 years now.
Yep, it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, isn’t as automated as far as auto support for paying to download 100 gig messes of modpacks that don’t work correctly, easily.
Yep, it requires a bit of learning how it works, and yep, a few particularly invasive/reconstructive/substantial mods require weird little work arounds.
But that is basically always going to be the case.
And Limo gives you all the tools you need to put in a bit of your own effort and figure out how to make things work, or identify things that just won’t work.
A mod manager cannot be an easy button, because mods by their nature are made by amateurs, are experimental, are mutually incompatible.
Trying to make a mod manager that is an easy button is a fundamentally doomed to fail idea, unless you think you can come up with a solution to handle every weird thing that ever has been or ever will be done by a modder, for every game, ever.
You would think these Nexus people would understand this automatically, having been doing what they’ve been doing for what like a decade or two now?
Mods and modding should not be a mass of consumers demanding to be served by a service provider who attempts to wrangle and manage tens or hundreds of thousands of of mod makers making and publishing mods.
That’s paywalls, that’s paid for mod stores, that’s a service provider that controls the IP snd distrobution rights of everyone involved way way more than it should.
You need the chaos of a bunch of random shit and people who may or may not work well together, you need the end user to actually assume the responsibility of having to put in some actual thought.
Trying to standardize and systemetize all of it for convenience’s sake destroys the very spirit of mods and modding.
Collection support is the number one reason I’m still trying to get vortex working on linux. Otherwise, I’d be trying limo out.
I haven’t managed to get Limo working. It’s clunky and straight up doesn’t launch mods.