Comment by imtringued
8 hours ago
I know that running Vortex is a pain but I never ran into any problems once it was installed. I did this back in 2022.
I don't want to discourage you, but what's wrong with helping MO2 and Vortex get ported to Linux?
That's a fair question! When I was on windows I never actually used Vortex, I only gave it a try on Linux when I had problems with MO2. But being an Electron app it's very unappealing to me. As for MO2, well, I don't really know C++ and wouldn't even know where to begin contributing even if I did... just for starters there's the whole question of how the virtual filesystem that MO2 does would work if it were native linux. In any case I know Go and wanted to implement some things that I didn't like how MO2 worked (eg tracking the version of additional mod files instead of just the main one). Plus new stuff like making a portable mod bundle that you can either backup or move to a new machine. Plus I generally like a CLI workflow :)
Vortex at one time did have a native Linux version. IIRC, it had very minimal game support, lagged behind the main branch, and was eventually canceled. I don't think they're interested in contributions for native Linux. A separate app seeking to implement Vortex API and package support would potentially be more free to improve the UX, do Flatpak/Appimage, or use more interesting Linux features like overlayfs and FUSE archive mounting. I have a mind to try my hand at it, would be a good starter project for a new language.
MO2 works fine on Linux! It’s a bit slow to start but I found it very usable, a bit less polished than Vortex maybe but it absolutely gets the job done and I got my head around it inside of an hour.
I'm familiar with MO2 from when I used windows, but I had a hard time getting it working on Linux. First problem was getting it installed. I found https://github.com/sonic2kk/steamtinkerlaunch which is supposed to let you install it into each game's wine/proton prefix which worked, but when I then tried to launch the game it would run with absolute terribile performance (like even just the title screen would lag and stutter...)
How did you install it? Maybe with a different method it would work for me better (even though now I'll probably just stick with my own tool I'm still curious)