YarrMatey

That’s the only one I know that runs on linux well, but it is not popular in most of the games I mod. I would not be able to make huge Skyrim modlists on it. I could string some valheim mods on it, but that’s about it so far. I stayed on windows for so long because I needed not just the games to run, but the mods I spend a lot of time on tinkering as well. I even tried other things like pushing a payload to a Nintendo switch recently and ended up just going back to my windows install where it detected RCM right away (but the linux tools I tried didn’t).

the modding scene on linux and how much busywork that took, that just killed a little bit of my soul.

Care to expand on that, I’m not too used to modding games, but from the times I tried it, it’s my understanding that 99% of the times it’s just putting stuff into the right folder. If not how is it different from Windows?

Alright so modding is actually harder on linux and stupid. You should use a mod manager and not manually install your mods so you can uninstall them easier, resolve conflicts easier, manage them, etc. But the mod managers don’t all work on linux natively. So you end up trying to get steam tinker launch working (to use vortex or mo2, but the creator hates modding and will let you know) or using other random things on github (like jackify). I spent way too much time trying to get this stuff to launch and that is before you start actually modding. I ended up doing some distro hopping to get the mod managers to work and ended up on CachyOs.

I had a lot of trouble getting this to work because of a weird Qt error. I joined their discord since the repo didn’t list this issue and it turned out that others also had the same trouble, and were all running pop!os like I was. Apparently this a known issue and they call it poop os there. Instead they recommend Fedora/Nobara or Bazzite or CachyOs. I ended up switching to CachyOs and now it just works.

You’ve probably got enough helpful responses from this, but I’ll throw in my two cents here. I am used to modding Skyrim on Windows, I last modded a few years ago and was ok at it. I usually manually made modlists with MO2 but have also used wabbajack. Recently I’ve been gaming on Pop!Os and was able to get steam, steam tinker launcher (STL), and vortex to play nicely on a different game (non-bethesda). Vortex only worked with hardlinks using STL, I had to reread that readme like 5 times to realize this checkbox on vortex was vital (by default it was on symlinks). I could not get the flatpak versions of these apps to play nicely. I was able to download from nexusmods on librewolf and it would open in vortex, something a lot of people seemed to have trouble with, but for me, It Just Works. Nexus premium is also good to have. I don’t know how hard it is to get MO2 (seems STL also supports it) or wabbajack working on linux, but if I ever find out, I’ll let you know.