https://www.nexusmods.com/news/15433 As we move into 2026, Vortex is shifting back to the centre of our development roadmap. While we have spent the last couple of years exploring new territory with the Nexus Mods App, we have decided to consolidate our efforts and bring all that innovation directly into Vortex. Over 1.4 million modders use Vortex every month to mod their games, and we’re committed to improving their modding experience.
Our plans for the year include a steady, iterative modernisation of the Vortex user experience. 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. Our goal is to make modding more accessible and reliable without disrupting the workflows that long-time Vortex users have come to rely on.
We’re also committing to supporting Vortex on SteamOS. We’ll be targeting vanilla Steam hardware like the Steam Deck and Steam Machine. 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.
Here’s an early proof of concept (subject to change) of the updated Vortex navigation:
Cuz I don't want to be dependent on a corporation. If, god forbid, Valve starts to enshitify, I don't want to go back 10 years in Linux Gaming. And Lutris works just as fine as Steam. So having options is always nice IMO.
Proton is vastly majority funded by Steam, in terms of how much development is done by whom.
So you're still basically dependent on Steam, if you're using Proton.
But yeah, its certainly good to still have Lutris and other launchers / wine-proton environment configurator tools... but...
Lutris' UI is a confusing unintuitive mess compared to Steam's, for the process of setting up a game to work via Proton.
And that's saying something, because Steam's is still a bit annoying.
Yes, Lutris having more tweakable options is nice, but... it also could be made in such a way that it generally just actually works 90% of the time.
Lutris does work, but its unnecessarily confusing with too many steps much of the time.
I guess I'm being a bit too harsh in just straight up questioning why Lutris even exists anymore, and what I am really conplaining about is that it is a bad UX and could benefit from an overhaul, one that still gives you all those tweakable settings, but streamlines and makes the most common procedures that most users are likely to do into a much less annoying process.
What about that heroic launcher though?
I haven't personally used it.
https://heroicgameslauncher.com/faq
Uh... sounds like that would work for purchased games, but not for generally just having a game.
???
Pretty sure it can work with games you did not buy, i've used it before
Lutris, Heroic, Steam, etc. all work in pretty much the same way for adding unofficial games. They just create wine/proton prefixes and add those as entries in the app.
Exactly, and in my opinion. Heroic feels easier to use than lutris for me tbh (though I am open for suggestions relating to launchers other than lutris or heroic)
Yeah, right now I mainly just use Steam or Heroic. I am keeping an eye on Faugus Launcher since it could end up being a pretty nice, lightweight option.
Also can't wait for Playnite when that finally starts being ported to Linux.
Take a chill dude. Don’t use it if you don’t find it useful. You don’t have to question its existence lol.
And about Proton being a product of Valve doesn’t matter when it’s open source—anyone can fork it and continue development (Proton itself is a fork of wine). It’s just if Linux becomes the default for everyone, Valve can enshitify themselves just like any other corporation and thus maybe not allow 3rd party installations or even add a Steam Shortcut. It is great for what it is now but I won’t put all my eggs in one basket; least of all a corpo basket.