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!!
Currently trying to mod Skyrim on Linux myself. I’ve got it to work now but it was a pain. I’m using MO2, it was really janky for a bit and still acts up a lot. I’m at the point now of always having MO2 open even if I’m not playing Skyrim, because closing and reopening it causes issues for me. Have you had any luck since posting this? I’m in the same boat as you, just a couple steps ahead, so I might be able to help out a little.
Hey, come check for my edit here some time in the next 24 hours. I managed to get something to actually work and I’m going to lay out a tutorial for it.
Looking forward to the update.
Glad to hear you got it to a working state!
The easiest way to mod Skyrim on Linux is to install a modlist with a tool called Jackify. See my other comment for a guide. Downloading modlists will cost one month’s subscription fee to Nexus Mods, but it saves a lot of time and effort.
Mods typically have very limited scope: they often do only one small thing. And they have dependencies, and the dependencies might have dependencies. To install a mod, you need to install all the dependencies, and then you need to set them up correctly. You’ll end up reading a novel’s worth of install instructions and spending hours upon hours of your time for all of that.
Using Jackify configures the Wine/Proton prefix so that the modlist, Skyrim and ModOrganizer2 works more or less correctly. Modlists can contain hundreds of mods, and all you need to do is pay the subscription fee and Jackify takes care of the rest.
Yeah, Nexus launching collections was actually an amazing boon to the modding community. I have ~1200 mods running on my Skyrim, and it was a one-click (okay, maybe two or three?) install that only cost the one month of Nexus Premium subscription. The hardest part was simply waiting the ~60 minutes for all of the mods to automatically download and install. But that’s also on the Windows side of my machine, because I didn’t want to deal with trying to mod it on Linux. I know MO2 and Jackify can replicate the same concept, but I haven’t personally tried it.
I’m no stranger to modding Skyrim, I did it a ton on windows and Xbox, it’s just MO2 specifically that I’m having issues with. I don’t mind learning mod dependencies and such, I’m used to that stuff.
That being said, I appreciate your comment and I’ll look into it a bit more. I’ve never considered mod packs before, because why waste the money if I can do it myself? But I’m in a similar situation as OP now (newborn plus work, considering school again) so maybe it’ll be worth the cost to have some free time back.