I wanted to give gate to sovngarde a try, and was following the Linux tutorial on their site, but things quickly fell apart when I couldn’t get steam tinker launch to get vortex running. It would throw out a “downloading” then “installing” popup, and then nothing would happen. Vortex appears to be installed in my Skyrim prefix, but STL just get caught in this loop of downloading and installing.
The way the gate to sovngarde devs have the process laid out is fresh install of Skyrim -> install some dependencies in the prefix via protontricks -> force STL (installed via protonup-qt) as compatibility tool -> install and run vortex
Things I’ve tried so far: attempting to launch vortex w/ the terminal, installing dotnet desktop 6 in the Skyrim prefix (I’ve read that can be an issue sometimes) using flatseal to allow protonup-qt and protontricks to view system files, and using bottles to get vortex installed just to see if I can even get it running on my system (some success, got through the install wizard, the vortex launch popup appears and then disappears).
Today I’m going to try installing the protonup-qt appimage instead of the flatpak, as that’s the recommended approach, but fedora/bazzite lacks FUSE 2 so I have to get that handled first. E: I let the appimage version run as an executable and it just opened. Not sure if that’s going to cause problems, but that’s what I did
I would love any suggestions, the handful of threads I’ve read pertaining to my issue haven’t worked. I feel like it’s either a bazzite specific problem or I simply lack the vocabulary and knowledge to find what I need
E 2: yesterday, STL created a program shortcut for vortex that has remained even after wiping STL, protonup-qt, and any files related to vortex off my system (and rebooting). When I click it, it throws an error saying "failed to change to directory /.config/STL/vortex/compdata/pfx/drive_c/program files/vortex
I followed that path and it doesn’t exist (like my machine is saying), the problem is that between/compdata/ and /pfix/ there’s /Skyrim/ in my actual system. I tried to give it the right directory in STL to no avail. It’s still throwing the same error. Not sure if that has anything to with my problem or not
I did make it work. I installed it once into empty prefix, copied the folder. Then I make a copy of it per game, place a copy in the game directory. much easier than managing multiple games across different prefixes. Just use “Run exe in prefix” for Heroic or Protontrix for Steam.
So I’ve been trying to get this going for a bit now. I installed vortex in skyrims prefix and got it running (via protontricks). It can seemingly detect Skyrim, at least when I click “manage” it creates an icon without a hitch. But it says it can’t deploy mods to the game, none of the fixes suggested by vortex can be applied, and I think I figured out why.
The prefix is in /.local/…/steamapps/compatdata while the actual game files are at /.local/…/steamapps/common
When you said you put vortex in the games directory, which were you talking about? Or am I just completely off base here?
Looks about correct. I put it in the game folder. But I think it shouldn’t matter, since it detects the game. Now, for the mods deployment, that’s weird. I usually switch to the “full copy” method and it works. I will attach some screenshots when I get near my PC.
I’ll give that a shot, thanks!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2941631681
Steam Deck is arch but it should be close.

