I used linux in the past, both privately and work-related, but the last time was over 10 years ago, so I’m a bit out of touch. I am in need of a new PC, but it’ll be a good year before I have the funds, so for now I am making due with an i5 7500 and a gtx 1660. I do have 32 GB so there’s that. I finally feel confident enough to make the permanent switch to linux from windows as all of the programs I use are either available on linux or have a good/better equivalent. The only thing I fear will hold me back is games. I know Steam has Proton now which will run most games, but how does it compare? The games I play most are Skyrim (heavily modded) , RDR2, Witcher 3, Transport fever, Civilization, Crusader kings 3 and Cities Skylines (uninstalled atm waiting for 2). I’m on the fence to either wait until I can afford a new PC and dual boot or make the switch now and deal with a few gaming problems. Thing is, what kind of problems may I expect? Anyone able and knowledgeable to give me some advice?
EDIT: Wow, those are a lot of replies; thank you everyone! You really helped me. I will make the switch sooner rather than later.
Sorry if there’s a lot of technical terms.
My anecdotal experience is that Skyrim modding under Linux worked surprisingly well. Despite that I think I would still say “YMMV”. I have it running under Lutris-GE-Proton8-13.
I used the GOG release because having local access to the installer is a major win. Note that even if you don’t install the AE upgrade it’s the same version number, 1.6.659 so bear this in mind when installing SKSE64 and mods. I think there’s a specific release of SKSE64 for GOG. Many mods label that version as AE only, which isn’t true of the GOG release.
I chose to install in Lutris because of how easy it is to manipulate prefixes. I had issues with the automated scripts, which I expected. So I did it myself.
I downloaded Skyrim from GOG and installed Skyrim using the “Install a Windows game from media” option, then run once from the launcher to ensure everything was initialised before modding.
Inside this prefix I installed MO2 using “Run EXE inside WINE prefix”.
I chose that mod manager because I used it on Windows and it worked just fine. I don’t know a lot about Vortex. There’s a DLL to add support for Epic and GOG installs of Skyrim. I duplicated the Skyrim SE runner and changed the target to ModOrganizer dot exe. There’s a UI bug that makes reordering mods act weird, just click another mod entry if it gets stuck.
The Nemesis issue I had, which appears to be a Linux/WINE problem - the solution given (Extract it to the Data folder then run the executable from MO2 with VFS) worked for me.
TBH my modlist is pretty tame compared to most that I’ve come across so I didn’t expect many problems. LOOT worked as expected so I just let LOOT handle my load order.
There’s probably more to it but this is what I remember. Happy modding!
Modlist
Nemesis issue
Mod Organizer 2
Super useful tool to help manage proton versions
So my current experience is Lutris-GE-Proton8 doesn’t work properly with all GOG installers and it just gives black flickering… However I used to have great success with Lutris.