I used to know how to install Skyrim mods on Linux. Then I took an arrow in the knee ...
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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For the Linux side, I've used Mod Organizer 2 on Linux via https://github.com/Furglitch/modorganizer2-linux-installer
The problem is that the Linux compatibility stuff is the first step, and as the Skyrim modding forums will tell you, getting Skyrim modded is basically a game in-and-of itself. There are various incompatibilities between different mods, load orders matter, and so forth. It's not a low-effort path.
Like, the real answer is that I don't think that there is really a great low-effort way to get just "modernized Skyrim" up and running. That's not that I don't sympathize
I think that there is real demand for someone who just wants a vanilla-with-a-lot-of-community-updates Skyrim with minimal effort and troubleshooting. I've done it, and it takes time to debug issues.
Also, there isn't just one "modded Skyrim". There are people who want to play a vanilla game, just with higher-res textures and higher-polygon models. There are people who want more changes, like cities that smoothly transition into the open world. Some people want a seriously modified game, like a survival game. There are people on LoversLab and similar who want an erotic open-world game. And those just aren't really compatible with each other.
I have never used Wabbajack on Linux successfully
haven't tried recently, either
but it downloads entire collections of pre-set-up mods. The idea is that it has some "pre-modded" configurations to start from that someone's tested. You don't get to configure everything, but in theory, it should "just work" on the Skyrim side of things, and it's the closest to that that I'm aware of.
EDIT: It looks like Wabbajack has "unofficial Linux guides" up off their main page, so some people are clearly using it on Linux these days.
Blows my mind that there aren't common modpacks for Skyrim. Last time I tried getting into it I spent probably a week getting everything together... then launched the game, played a couple of hours, then got distracted by life.
Never went back to it because I didn't want to go through the exercise of maintaining it.
What you're looking for is called "Wabbajack". It's a pretty impressive system, because it actually pulls all the mods from their official nexus mods source, rather than requiring you get permission from every mod you want to include to be compiled into some new package that then has to be maintained and updated whenever anything updates.
It's like setting up a full-blown, fully tweaked modlist in a single click. Really impressive solution to navigating a lot of the thorniness that would come from redistributing other people's work in a "traditional" modpack.
Never went back to it because I didn't want to go through the exercise of maintaining it.
You shouldn't be actively trying to maintain it. Some mods and patchers like DynDoLOD will break if you change your load order during a playthrough.
Best practice is to get it set up and stick with it until you're ready to start a new game
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Honestly, I think that one thing that people don't appreciate about Linux is how much work has been done on a common license front (BSD/LGPL/GPL/MIT) to help unify work, and how much work has been done by packaging and testing people, the distro guys. Like, if people had to spin their own Linux setup out of open-source repos
some on GitHub, some one SourceForge, etc
it'd be a lot harder. That's kinda what the Skyrim modding world is like.
The Skyrim modding crowd has several sources of fragmentation, I think:
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Bethesda doesn't actually make money off mods at all, unless it's from the Creation Club and paid, of which there is not much. Skyrim is closed source, so they're the only people who can work on that. My guess is that some stuff, like Skyrim Script Extender, really should have been folded into the base game...but there's just not money in it for Bethesda, and they aren't a volunteer project. If you look at a favorite open source game of mine, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, there are surprisingly few mods...because over the years, things that would have been "mods" for a lot of commercial games were just added to the base game.
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Bethesda has been comparatively-restrictive on what content they'll host, so "just put a mod on Bethesda's site" isn't going to be a universal solution.
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NexusMods, probably the largest mod distribution site, is a company, and has no incentive to help facilitate other sources of mod distribution. So their mod managers only support automatic download of mods from NexusMods.
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Some mods are going to cause moral outrage or are even outright illegal in some places.
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Because many mods don't allow redistribution, they can't be moved to another site. That also limits the clients that can automatically handle them.
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Because mods generally are not under licenses that permit forking, people can't just go out and fix some of these compatibility problems and release a fork that works.
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Sometimes people take down mods. Maybe they don't want people to know that they were producing an erotic mod. Maybe they just get angry or frustrated and want to stop. Maybe they get in a fight with someone else. Maybe they're doing a political protest (I remember some users doing this when Russia invaded Ukraine). With FOSS software, that's not much of a problem, because the rest of the world can fork and continue development. That's often not the case with Skyrim mods.
And a lot of these problems affect modding of games other than Skyrim. It's just a particularly big problem because Skyrim is an extremely-heavily-modded game.
I'd like to see a cross-platform game-agnostic mod manager. Something that'd have enough scale that it could be maintained on an ongoing basis, past a single game's lifetime. Support non-interactive operation, conflict resolution (automatically disabling various sets of mods, restarting game, asking user if problem is gone), downloading from a variety of sites automatically. Downloading deltas efficiently, rather than whole archives, if a user has a recent version already. Then, if any game-specific support is required, just have a small extension to add that. That won't solve all the problems
the license problem on Skyrim mods is, I think, a big root cause
but at least it'd be a starting point.
Like, if people had to spin their own Linux setup out of open-source repos
some on GitHub, some one SourceForge, etc
it'd be a lot harder.
There's a name for that: it's called "Linux From Scratch."
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Jesus people they didn't ask for 20 questions, they asked you to do a thing for them. You want the $20 or not?
Honestly I'm starting to wonder if the modding community is just a hoax I've fallen for because every mention of it turns into this same thread. Plenty of "it works for me" and absolutely nothing substantial.
For the sake of the community, I ask that whoever is the one to help to post the issue/fix if possible in case it helps others in the future.
I'd offer to help myself, but I've only modded Skyrim on Windows so far. Some people on here have done it in Linux and thus are more qualified
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Buddy, if I knew how I'd do it for free, I feel your pain.
What distribution are you on? What mod manager have you tried using? And what mods are you trying to install?
Also have you tried Skyrim Anniversary edition? It has some basic built in modding capabilities.
Bazzite I've tried vortex, MO2, and Limo
Mods are the top 25 most downloaded quality of life, graphics, and patch mods as well as everything for Legacy of the dragonborn. I played it once a few years ago and I just want to enjoy that gain.
Edit: You can now add wabbajack to that list. I got it to run but it freezes if I click literally anything and I have to kill it to see my screen.
Mods are the top 25 most downloaded
Some of those mods are old and outdated. Not sure which off the top of my head though.
Did you install all the dependencies for these mods? Nexus should have a grey tab labelled 'Requirements' to link to the necessary pages. Also, some of the mods requure SKSE (Skyrim Script Extender) which is on a different site and uses a different install process.
Also, did you boot the game up before trying to start modding it? At least on Windows you need to do that first because the game generates some .dll files you need for it to work.
One more thing: which version of Skyrim did you get from Steam/GOG?
"Skyrim", also known as "Skyrim Legendary Edition" or "LE" for short, is a 32-bit game and is listed as just "Skyrim" on Nexus Mods.
"Skyrim Special Edition", also known as "SSE", and "Skyrim Anniversary Edition", also known as "AE", are the 64-bit versions, and mods for them are listed under "Skyrim Special Edition" on Nexus Mods.
Also, SSE and AE are the same thing, assuming SSE is updated to the newest version. The only difference is that SSE comes with 4 free Creation Club mods, while AE gives you access to "all" Creation Club content.
Long story short, if you bought the 64-bit version and are trying to install mods from the 32-bit version (or vice versa), a lot of mods won't work
I'm not entirely new to modding and I've done all the basics. The the big problem is that the best options for mod managers don't run on Linux and the only options I can find on Linux either don't work or don't offer any explanations for why the game doesn't work.
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If you shoot me a message, I would be happy to help you out if I can, free of charge. I used to mod skyrim a lot and havnt done it on Linux yet, but I'd be willing to give it a go.
I guess I used this to install modorganizer 2 on my computer.
https://github.com/Furglitch/modorganizer2-linux-installer
I use MO2 without issue. I juste download the mods manually from nexusmod and it's fine.
I used this one for FNV, and could download mods straight from Nexus to mod organizer.
Worked very easy for me.
I found this github for a lutris setup with vortex: https://github.com/monyarm/lutris-skyrimse-installers ... if anyone wants to figure this out for op.
It's been so long that I forgot I've tried this method. My experience with lutris is actually what turned me on to bazzite. It's fantastic for gaming so long as you don't mind running everything in steam.
Getting paid to access someone's computer by its owner... Interesting 🤔
I have no idea of how it o do it, but OP please be careful on who you let in your system. Kind strangers, be careful who's computer you go into
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Wow. I'm doing the same thing right now. I bought and installed Skyrim for the first time a few days ago. Then I thought, if I'm going to play it, it should be with all the graphics mods. Which I haven't figured out so I haven't played.
Honestly, just play the game. You don't need mods. If you really like the game, you can revisit mods later.
That's usually what I do. First play through on a game I'll do without/minimal mods. After that though... game on! My Skyrim has 141 mods now and is hardly the same game anymore.
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It's worth plying without mods if you wanna save the headache, but I've been playing it for 9 years now so something new would be nice.
before spending money: check out the software called wabbajack, which has pre-configured mod-packages you can install :)
otherwise hmu, you can hop on my discord and me or my nerdy friends will help you for free :)
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.
It looks like Jackify is the answer you are looking for. It's a tool for Linux users to install Wabbajack modlists and set up everything needed. Wabbajack is a Windows tool to install modlists for various games.
You could install mods for Skyrim one by one, but that is going to take many, many hours and at least one whole bottle of painkillers for the headaches it causes. A better solution is to download an entire modlist, and Jackify looks to be one stop solution for that. Just install and run it, choose modlist, wait for it to download and install, and just sit back and enjoy. I recommend Nordic Souls, which is about 1300 or so mods. It is a great modlist, but be warned that it takes several minutes to launch Skyrim with that modlist. To install modlists, you will need a paid subscription for Nexus Mods.
Also, make sure you have Anniversary Edition of Skyrim, or modding is going to be way more complicated.
EDIT: I almost forgot to mention that, yes, I did set up and play modded Skyrim (Nordic Souls) under Linux. But, I did it the hard way by installing SteamTinkerLaunch, ModOrganizer2 and Wabbajack. Wabbajack, especially, was problematic under Linux. But, once everything was set up, it was smooth sailing.
I feel you.. Sorry i cant help but i feel you... It gets better they say
I tried to play the official Skyrim VR and couldn't even make it through the intro because the horse cart would bug out before it completed the path. I haven't even started the modding process yet but it's funny that I'll likely have to do that to even play at all 🙃
That's when you use an Alternate Start mod. I highly recommend Realm of Lorkhan or Alternate Perspective. There's even a mod for those two to combine. With the Wabbajack stuff above, I would even recommend starting with something like the FUS / FUS Heavy modlists, or you can go all out with the Mad God's Overhaul 3.7.
I can't vouch how any of this runs on Linux tho. Maybe I'll flip eventually.
If I don't get to hear "Hey you, you're finally awake" to start my day, I don't feel like I'm even playing Skyrim.
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I think the cart doing weird things has something to do with the framerate. It's been years since I tried playing skyrim, but I vaguely remember that the physics was somehow tied to the framerate.
And this post on the steam forum seems to confirm it https://steamcommunity.com/app/72850/discussions/0/3195866872030068939/
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Just spitballing, but most of modding skyrim is just loading .esm and .esp files in the right order.
You may be able to get the modlist downloaded, load order sorted (and any merged patches made if those are still a thing) in a Windows VM, then shift the files and load order list over to Linux so you're just struggling with Linux compatibility to run instead of also with the setup of the mods.
As far as I know, that's the reccomended way to handle modding for a lot of games running on linux through compat layer stuff.
As far as mods themselves, I'd pick one of the more popular packs on nexus or wabbajack that appeals to you and doesn't seem to have a lot of complaints about bugs in the comments.
Modding has multiple hurdles. Getting the tools set up, getting the game set up, selecting and installing the mods, working out compatibility issues, and making sure everything runs at the end. By sticking with a popular modpack, you cut out selecting the mods and having to figure out getting them working together yourself. By using a Windows VM for initial setup, you cut out most of the struggles of getting the tools working on Linux. Hopefully that would cut the challenges down to a managable level.
I have looked into this, unfortunately I was just as lost trying to learn how to set up and run a VM that it just felt like a detour on a road to nowhere. I genuinely can't stress how desperate I am to be offering the whole of my fun money for the month and the entire safety of my computer to maybe get a chance to play a game.
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Bro buy a premium nexus mods account and then install vortex from Nexus mods and simply go to https://www.nexusmods.com/games/skyrimspecialedition/collections and basically one click install a thousand mods. Choose a collection that has the highest success rate install and just follow the very few directions you'll need to do (like launch Skyrim once or something after new install)
Unfortunately, vortex runs on Linux about as well as unpatched Skyrim runs on on Linux. I've tried using the api link from nexus to install mods both with limo and with umo for OpenMW and as far as I can figure, the sandboxing on bazzite stops them from being able to recieve the links.
Ive only ever used Vortex and it works great for me, even on the steam deck.
I used ProtonUpQT (its on the flatpak store) to install SteamTinkerLaunch.
For the game you want to run, you set the compatibility tool to SteamTinkerLaunch (same menu you would use to select the proton version).
Then in your steam library you create a category called Vortex and add whatever games you want running vortex to it.
Then when you launch the game you get a SteamTinkerLaunch menu where you can change loads of settings and access Vortex Mod Manager.
Ive played Fallout 4 (should be similar situation to Skyrim) like this since the Steam Deck came out and the only issue i came across is when i had a game on the SD card Vortex couldnt find the game location so i had to create some symlinks.
This method also worked for me when playing Starfield.
You can install mods by copying the Nexus mods link into Vortex and they also auto update.
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Does that work in Linux now? Last I heard they were working on a Linux version but it was a limited roll out.
Oh god I’m sorry modding on Linux is painful. I did it some years ago but it’s been a minute - my best guess would be to use LOOT (Load Order Optimization Tool) since that spits out very specific package/dependency issues in text form.
Hopefully you can get it sorted, Godspeed in the meantime. /gen
What's the timeline on this? I have played a bunch of modded Skyrim but just switched to Linux. That said I was about to build a mod list for myself, probably a lightish simonrim (basically vanilla +) setup with the good quest/new land mods if compatible. If that sounds like something you would also like I will just give you my mod list and load order when done.
Timeline is basically forever, unless someone comes through on this I'm just sol on the whole idea. I'm trying another poster's suggestion for steam tinker launcher right now but my first attempt crashed so hard it forced a system reboot. Scond attempt is 7% through installing a modlist, so if it doesn't detonate my computer I'll tell you what I did to save you the headache.
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No need for money. Many people will glady help you 😁. Anyway I have not modded skyrim yet. But a easy way to mod on Linux I found is copy the installed game including mods over from windows where you did mod the game. Works for quite a few games. If you can't get it working directly from Linux that is.
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