NexusMods Is "Committing" To Supporting Vortex On Steam Deck/SteamOS

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Modding on the Steam Deck can sometimes feel a little more complicated than modding on Windows computers. Filepaths can be different, especially when trying to discern between prefixes and game file locations, and mod managers aren't as intuitive. However, one of my favorite mod managers, Vortex, is getting Steam Deck/SteamOS support, and I couldn't be more excited.

Over on the NexusMods website, the team made a new blog post to discuss their focus for 2026. NexusMods is one of the biggest websites when it comes to finding and downloading mods for their games, and has been the go-to hub for Bethesda games and many more. In this post, they go on to discuss how 2026 will look for them, and towards the end, they commit to supporting SteamOS, while targeting the Steam Deck and Steam Machine:

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.

NexusMods Team

This is huge news, and one I am welcoming with open arms. This means that we will be able to use Vortex to easily mod our games on the Deck, and that will make managing mods and getting them set up significantly easier. I do appreciate that Vortex is open source, so community devs can extend support for other Linux distributions, but the target to make sure SteamOS is supported is just a treat. Now, I can finally use my grandfathered NexusMods Premium account to my heart's content.

This is also after the team stopped working on their cross-platform program, the Nexus Mods app, which seemed to kill hopes of a mod manager from NexusMods on the Steam Deck.

It sounds like NexusMods has a very big year ahead of it, though. They have reorganized their team to make all their teams work better together, and are prioritizing important improvements like easing pain points for authors and creators, fine-tuning mod installation to make sure everything works correctly as soon as you hit play, and improving platform stability. They will also be investing heavily into Vortex, focusing on big quality of life improvements, streamlining navigation, and bringing in more intuitive controls for load orders. The interface will become cleaner and more responsive to make modding as accessible as possible.

There is no timeline exactly on when any of this will be delivered, but the team has reassured us that it is being worked on. They want to be more transparent, and as someone who very much values transparency, I couldn't be happier. I can't wait to use Vortex on my Steam Deck, and I look forward to what the team will be pushing out in the future.

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