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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

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)

I found this install script!

https://github.com/Furglitch/modorganizer2-linux-installer

Download, run install.sh, follow the instructions given. It replaces the game effectively in Steam, which does mean you have to launch MO2 anytime you want to play the game, but I found that at worst, slightly annoying.

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