Hey gang! Wanna start by thanking everyone for the kind words, advice, and commiseration over the last few days. I managed to get it set up and I’m going to turn this edit into a short tutorial for what I did. Big thanks to [email protected], they’re actually the suggestion that worked out best.
For background, I’m running bazzite on desktop PC.
ProtonUp QT is on the bazaar flatpack store and readily available for other distros in the same way. Install that, run it, pick STEAM TINKER LAUNCHER. It’s simple enough.
!IMPORTANT! You have to restart steam after you do this step or it won’t show up in the compatibility tool list.
Install your game, update it, and run it once so all the files are there and fresh. If you aren’t certain about the freshness of the files (like me after 4 different attempts with other software…) Just delete the whole game folder and have steam check the local files.
Go into the game setting, compatibility tools, tick the force compatibility and pick the Steam Tinker Launcher. Then launch the game.
If you’re like me, this will flash a window for STL and then launch the game. If you quit the game it will give you a chance to edit the STL settings. Just click the button for vortex.
This opens another window, where we click the install button. Now if you’re like me, this will immediately crash your computer. Hopefully you’re luckier. Upon rebooting and relaunching the game, vortex will inexplicably be working just fine.
Now, there are a few hangups in vortex, to download mods you’ll have to copy the URL and paste them in the download page. When you go to manage conflicts you’ll have to use arrow keys to make selections, and every so often it won’t let you drag and drop files into it until you restart.
Lastly, I suggest annually installing skse for Skyrim. Easy stuff, extract the file, rename the skse launcher to replace your Skyrim launcher, and dump all the files into the Skyrim folder. All your mods will complain, they think it’s not installed, but it is and it works fine.
I personally used a mod pack for the legacy of the dragonborn. It costs money to get those and it’s not required.
Anyways, thanks again everyone!!
Honestly, I think that one thing that people don’t appreciate about Linux is how much work has been done on a common license front (BSD/LGPL/GPL/MIT) to help unify work, and how much work has been done by packaging and testing people, the distro guys. Like, if people had to spin their own Linux setup out of open-source repos — some on GitHub, some one SourceForge, etc — it’d be a lot harder. That’s kinda what the Skyrim modding world is like.
The Skyrim modding crowd has several sources of fragmentation, I think:
Bethesda doesn’t actually make money off mods at all, unless it’s from the Creation Club and paid, of which there is not much. Skyrim is closed source, so they’re the only people who can work on that. My guess is that some stuff, like Skyrim Script Extender, really should have been folded into the base game…but there’s just not money in it for Bethesda, and they aren’t a volunteer project. If you look at a favorite open source game of mine, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, there are surprisingly few mods…because over the years, things that would have been “mods” for a lot of commercial games were just added to the base game.
Bethesda has been comparatively-restrictive on what content they’ll host, so “just put a mod on Bethesda’s site” isn’t going to be a universal solution.
NexusMods, probably the largest mod distribution site, is a company, and has no incentive to help facilitate other sources of mod distribution. So their mod managers only support automatic download of mods from NexusMods.
Some mods are going to cause moral outrage or are even outright illegal in some places.
Because many mods don’t allow redistribution, they can’t be moved to another site. That also limits the clients that can automatically handle them.
Because mods generally are not under licenses that permit forking, people can’t just go out and fix some of these compatibility problems and release a fork that works.
Sometimes people take down mods. Maybe they don’t want people to know that they were producing an erotic mod. Maybe they just get angry or frustrated and want to stop. Maybe they get in a fight with someone else. Maybe they’re doing a political protest (I remember some users doing this when Russia invaded Ukraine). With FOSS software, that’s not much of a problem, because the rest of the world can fork and continue development. That’s often not the case with Skyrim mods.
And a lot of these problems affect modding of games other than Skyrim. It’s just a particularly big problem because Skyrim is an extremely-heavily-modded game.
I’d like to see a cross-platform game-agnostic mod manager. Something that’d have enough scale that it could be maintained on an ongoing basis, past a single game’s lifetime. Support non-interactive operation, conflict resolution (automatically disabling various sets of mods, restarting game, asking user if problem is gone), downloading from a variety of sites automatically. Downloading deltas efficiently, rather than whole archives, if a user has a recent version already. Then, if any game-specific support is required, just have a small extension to add that. That won’t solve all the problems — the license problem on Skyrim mods is, I think, a big root cause — but at least it’d be a starting point.
There’s a name for that: it’s called “Linux From Scratch.”
Tbf, Mod Organizer is mostly that