After killing its multiplatform mod manager, Nexus revives its spirit with an announcement that its Windows-only app will support SteamOS in future

Cast your mind back to Monday, and you might remember me telling you that the Nexus Mods App—Nexus Mods’ skunkworks mod manager that supported both Windows and Linux/SteamOS—was being Old Yeller’d so the site’s devs could focus entirely on Vortex, its venerable, Windows-only mod wrangler. Nexus promised that it would look into supporting Linux for Vortex at some indeterminate point in the future, but I wasn’t too optimistic.

Well, sceptical past-me was clearly a clown, because Nexus yesterday put out another announcement, this time fully committing to SteamOS support for Vortex. “We’ll be targeting vanilla Steam hardware like the Steam Deck and Steam Machine,” says Nexus general manager Iluviel. “We won’t be officially supporting any other configurations, but as Vortex is an open source project, community developers will be free to extend support for their preferred Linux distros as they please.”

SteamOS, if you’ve forgotten, is just a Valve-ified flavour of Arch Linux, so this is a de facto commitment to Linux support on Vortex. It might be a little bit more of a faff on non-SteamOS distros—you’ll likely have to rely on third-party repos not maintained by Nexus itself—but hey, it’s a lot better than keeping Vortex indefatigably Windows-exclusive.

Of course, that’s not to say everyone’s jimmies were unrustled by this news. A commitment to Linux is a start, but modders and players have their issues with Vortex that go beyond the platforms it works on. Indeed, in its original announcement, Nexus called out one bugbear in particular: “We know load order management in Vortex, particularly for Bethesda games, has been a sticking point.”

There’s a little more detail on what else Nexus is doing with Vortex in this most recent announcement. “We’ll be investing in the developer experience, which will allow us to focus on quality-of-life improvements, specifically streamlining navigation, simplifying game management, and introducing more intuitive controls for load orders. You can expect the interface to become cleaner and more responsive as we integrate the design lessons learned from our recent projects.”

Which, hey, sounds good, albeit still a little vague. That’s probably because Nexus is still quite early in this process: “We can’t promise any of these projects are going to get done and delivered right now, or within the next couple of weeks, or the next few months. But we’ve started work and hope to have something to show you as soon as we can.”

Me? I’m still a Mod Organiser 2 man, but I’m not averse to being won over by Vortex, especially if it’ll run on my Steam Deck and Fedora desktop.