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:

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    21 hours ago

    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.

    • sonofearth@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      18 hours ago

      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.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        21 hours ago

        I haven’t personally used it.

        https://heroicgameslauncher.com/faq

        Is it possible to use Heroic to launch games that have been purchased outside of the Epic Games Store or GOG, such as on a physical disc or through another digital store?

        Yes, you can use the ADD GAME feature in Heroic to add games that have been purchased outside of the Epic Games Store or GOG. After installing the game normally, use the ADD GAME option and fill in the necessary information. Heroic will automatically retrieve an image for the game from the web. If the game requires an installer to be run before launching, you can use the “Run Installer First” button on the ADD GAME screen to do so.

        Uh… sounds like that would work for purchased games, but not for generally just having a game.

        ???

        • hunkyburrito@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          13 hours ago

          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.

          • Sentry64@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            1·
            1 hour ago

            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)