Nexus Mods is one of the more prolific mod sites on the internet, housing mods for everything from Skyrim and Fallout New Vegas to Stardew Valley and Subnautica. While the mod platform has a native Windows application, called Vortex, the development team behind Nexus Mods recently confirmed in a 2026 development roster that, as part of an effort to modernize Vortex, the mod application, it will get support for the Valve Steam Deck and Steam Machine in 2026. The blog post announcing future Linux support explicitly states that Nexus Mods will only be focusing on "vanilla Steam hardware," and that it will not be officially supporting any other Linux distributions. Currently, Linux users have to download and manually install mods, the traditional way, usually by moving the mod files into the correct game library folders. Official Linux support in Vortex would not only make mods easier to install, but it may streamline the modding experience altogether and make mods easier to maintain on Linux or SteamOS.

While Vortex will not officially support any other Linux distributions, the development team notes that Vortex is open-source and invites Linux developers and gamers to add support for their distribution of choice. According to Nexus Mods, Vortex is used by over 1.4 million users every month, so there is likely to be at least one passionate developer who will add support for other major distributions. Other priorities for 2026 also include improving malware protections, specifically scanning files before they are downloaded onto user PCs and have a chance to do harm; reducing friction for creators on the platform, including streamlining the mod upload form and developing a new mod upload API. Vortex will also get a new UI, with the aim of "streamlining navigation, simplifying game management, and introducing more intuitive controls for load orders."