Protontricks can help for some games. Personally I used it to install Openplanet for Trackmania which doesn't have any sort of explicit Linux support specified.

What Protontricks does is allow you to run installation files within the context of a steam game, as you mentioned. Simply launch Protontricks and select the game you're trying to modify and it will mount it properly for you. Then choose "Run an arbitrary executable (.exe/.msi/.msu)" and proceed to run the installer as you would normally.

Sometimes the path can still be a bit janky. For example when Openplanet wanted to install to the Trackmania directory as mounted through Protontricks, I had to specify: Z:\home\.steam\steam\steamapps\common\Trackmania.

You might try Vortex through lutris: lutris.net/games/vortex-mod-ma…

I'm not sure why one of those is flagged. From what I can see its just the obnoxiously written write_file.content one-liners and lots of regex/sed, but nothing looks wrong with what its doing.

Vortex Mod Manager

Vortex Mod Manager - Lutris

^Lutris

See this monster of a post from u/sp3ctr4l@dbzer0

lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/18288…

<br />To add in about game modding on Linux:

https://github.com/limo-app/limo

https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.limo_app.limo

Limo is a universal mod manager that is linux native.

And I do mean universal. It’ll work with literally any game, you just have to take a bit of extra time to configure things for games that do not yet have a supported preset configuration out of the box… but at this point, that includes most games that are generally reliant on some kind of mod manager type program on Windows, to keep track of 10s or 100s of simultaneous mods.

It works very much along the same lines as something like Mod Organizer 2, though there are some differences, read the wiki.

It sets up a virtual file system that allows mods to be set up outside of the main game directory itself, and will override them such that the mods actually load, but they can be ‘undeployed’ to revert back to vanilla, you can set up different profiles of different mod configurations and deploy/undeploy what you like.

It can also manage load orders, supports formats such as fomod and similar for games like Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim, you can set up tags and category groupings, and it also shows you conflicts between mods down to the specific files, showing you a chain of overwrites to the final file from the final loaded mod.

It doesn’t support things like LOOT, which purport to autogenerate correct load orders… but frankly, thats fine, because shit like that doesn’t even work properly in situations you’d use it in on Windows 90% of the time.

EDIT: Wow, apparently it does support LOOT now, it did not a few updates ago.

…

I have successfully gotten FONV working using Limo to set up uh… there’s a variant of the Viva New Vegas mod setup guide aimed at Steam Deck users, but it tells you to set up Mod Organizer 2 on the Deck… which you can do, but its rather input laggy and there are other inconveniences…

Here it is, Mirelurked Viva New Vegas:

https://ashtonqlb.github.io/mirelurked-vnv/intro.html

I had to alter a few steps from this to get it working with Limo, but they were basically just… set up Limo instead of MO2, and you have to handle NVSE a bit differently, because it literally replaces/overrides the entire main game exe.

…

I have also used Limo to mod Cyberpunk 2077, works with more in depth frameworks like CET, RedExt, etc, as well as using the Decky Framegen plugin to insert FSR 3.1 Upscaling and Framegen into CP77, which gives better quality and fps than the official FSR 2 and 3 implementations that come with the vanilla game and are vanilla supported on a Deck.

You basically just have to launch the vanilla game via the normal launcher first, check the ‘enable mods’ switch, fully load the game…

Then you can set up the Framegen mod, which adds a custom command in steam to the launch parameters… and then you can also setup the ‘skip intro’ mod, which is reliant on both the mod being present, as well as additional command line parameters…

There are a bunch of reddit posts complaining that the FrameGen mod doesn’t allow other additional launch arguments, but they are wrong.

All you have to do is append those additional launch args … at the end of the FrameGen mod’s launch arg. This just doesn’t seem to be explicitly documented anywhere, by anyone… I may have been the first person to figure this out?

Anyway, after that bit of silliness, setting up other mods for CP 77 using Limo is fairly straightforward.

…

… I am doing all this on Bazzite on a Deck, but you could do it on… presumably any linux distro that supports flatpaks and proton (the translation layer that allows Windows games to run on Linux).

There will always be a few ‘weird’ mods that are just totally reliant on a whole bunch of Windows specific things to work, or just cannot be made to work without actually overwriting some core game files in the main, real directory itself…

And, some of these mods will require a windows component dependency, like vc_2017 or vc_2022, you set those up with something like ProtonTricks or SteamTinkerLaunch to modify the proton config per game, instead of trying to install the exe system wide as 99% of the windows oriented mods will tell you to do…

But so far, I have found either my own solutions for these cases, or someone else already has, or someone has just made basically a linux compatible equivalent for such a windows reliant mod.

… You can also just choose to run MO2 on Linux, it will work, its just… buggy, and overlycomplicated, imo, you’ve got to set up a custom wineprefix for the MO2 UI to not do dumbshit, give it thr dependencies it needs, and then you’ve got to do this for each different game you want to mod with MO2.

I found that Limo is sufficiently capable and much less hassle to use once you take the time to understand its differences from MO2.