Orginal Oblivion with mods. I have never played it. I just got the game installed yesterday, and set up in Vortex. Now I have to go grab all the mods, which is very manual. Vortex mod installation links on the Nexus don’t work on the deck. There might be a way to fix that because the mod suggestion list I’m looking at said there’s a way to make links work with Mod Manager 2 on the Deck.

I’m following a curated list of mods that will be a “vanilla+” experience. Not too crazy or anything. It’s called “A Pocket Full of Cheese Wheels” on the Nexus. It comes with a one-click installer shell script that installs Mod Manager 2 and a bunch of other stuff on the Deck but I’m just going to do it manually. The script is old and no longer maintained.

I modded Fallout 3 with Vortex on my Deck, and it was pretty easy when the game is installed on the SD card. I feel like that was key, but I don’t remember exactly why. You also have to symlink the “My Games” folder from the Fallout 3 (or Oblivion) Proton prefix into the Vortex Proton Prefix. That’s so Vortex can manage the INI files and such. Plus you set the SD card as the D: drive in the Vortex Proton prefix so it can see the game’s folder, too. In fact, I think that’s was done automatically done by Steam. Maybe that was why I installed the game on the SD card. But it’s not like you couldn’t make your own drive mapping. It’s a simple symlink named like “d:” or “e:” in the “dos_devices” folder. I don’t see why that couldn’t point to the NVMe drive, but I feel like people online said that wouldn’t work. Vortex is also installed on the SD card.

Maybe some day I’ll document all of this.

That’s awesome! Must have taken a day or two, I bet.

You have to eat the skins, and you have to add butter made from the milk of grassfed cows. Only then does it offer enough nutrition to survive. It’s still not great for you.

Does it actually list the packages that are suggested?

If a package is recommended, it gets installed by default. They’re not strictly necessary for the core functionality of the main package, but they are commonly used by many users.

On the other hand, suggested packages are like plugins. They won’t necessarily be important to most users, but some might find them handy. Things like alternate backends for specific use cases, or a plugin to enable a specific (and rarely used) service.

I haven’t used apt in a while, but I don’t think there’s a way to automatically install all suggested packages. I think you just install them manually by copying and pasting the package names, and running additional apt install commands.

But unless you know what specific usage you need before I probably wouldn’t bother.

I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas.

Why not just write to USB directly?

cp debian.iso /dev/sdX

Because one single character typo and you just wiped out your system drive or some secondary HDD. It’s much safer to use a tool like Etcher.