Hi everyone,

Like you, I've been waiting years for the arrival of a DRM-free version of Skyrim on GOG. Since there is a symbiosis between opposition to DRM and free software (like in "freedom"), I think it would be wonderful to allow Linux users to be able to play this game without DRM.

I have been playing the Steam version on Linux for years without any problems (mods included), even with better performance. On the GOG side, a "wrapper" containing Wine/Proton and the libraries needed to translate Microsoft's Directx might suffice. I have used Wine 6.5 to date, because some versions of Proton do not allow to open the command console inside the game.

Please, GOG, earn on this splendid occasion the respect among Linux users once and for all. We are a valuable niche that you are missing out on due to your shortsightedness and the technological changes achieved with Proton and the SteamDeck.

GOG used to make wine wrappers in the very distant past. I think they stopped that practice long ago.

And I don't know if it's really worth the effort. Installing your own is a good way to ensure you get the latest bugfixes and most compatibility with your distro.

Last night tried Skyrim under wine (with latest dxvk). Played for a few hours. No tweaks were required except winetricks xact to restore music and dialogue sound. Runs perfectly, from what I can tell. This is with wine from Fedora's repos, which is v. 7.12 currently.

Kinda sound entitled there on the last paragraph, but GOG is first and foremost a DRM-free gamestore while Steam start to be community-driven effort after Valve somehow abandoned making games apart from VR tech demos
.
Proton is still by nature a SaaS like all OS did (to maintain compatibility). I do consider using Linux to keep older, still running well system ran healthy especially after big MS trying to add more bloat and impose more "security" in Windows 11, but...

I think Proton do work on non-Steam games. It's just needing a lot of Q&A especially on niche titles. But titles i intend to play for life (when 2038 came i hope there's a wrapper to turn back time to allow x86 apps to be ran into a sandbox) like Elder Scrolls series, Fallout series, and GTA series before 4 has numerous Linux forums to play it.

GNU/Linux users are <5%

I found this to be a pretty straight forward install under Linux as well. I used PlayOnLinux and installed the DXVK package. If you don't use DXVK you'll have artifacts and a horrible framerate.

One thing that tripped me up with mods was the proper AppData path was not immediately obvious. For me, the plugins.txt file should not go under "/AppData/Local/Skyrim Special Edition GOG", but instead was found in "/Local Settings/Application Data/Skyrim Special Edition GOG".*

I'm not interested in installing Vortex, so instead I found that if I created symlinks of Skyrim Special Edition that pointed to Skyrim Special Edition GOG, I could use Wrye Bash (for example) instead.

(ln -s "./Skyrim Special Edition GOG" "Skyrim Special Edition")

I ended up creating two symlinks as siblings to the GOG folders, one that points at "My Games/Skyrim Special Edition GOG" and one that points at the application data folder ("/Local Settings/Application Data/Skyrim Special Edition GOG") as described above.

Hopefully this helps somebody if they're trying to use mods.

*Edit: I missed this detail initially so I wanted to point it out - the "appdata" path people are talking about is not %appdata% but "%localappdata%" - whatever that resolves to is where you will find the Skyrim Special Edition GOG folder.

Worth noting that:
* GNU/Linux users are responsible for significantly more than 5% of bug reports, even if you ignore platform-specific bugs.
* Bug reports from GNU/Linux users tend to be higher quality.

I am not sure how much Effort it costs,
but just think about it, if the break even Point is fine, you could make something to get 2-3% more Customers.
The wet Dream of any Manager, they tend to have more Effort by trying to "fix" internal Processes, firing People or squeezing out more working Hours just to get a bit more Profit.

Valve seems to have noticed that and also makes itself more independend from Windows.
But Valve is big, it is surely easier for them to affort it.

What I did to make Skyrim run on my system (OpenSuse Tumbleweed, AMD GPU):

- Wine GE (specifically Wine-GE-Proton7-29)
- winetricks faudio (needed to hear bg music and voices)
- launch via SkyrimSE.exe (starting the game via it's launcher didn't work for me)
- setting bBorderless=1 in ~/Documents/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition GOG/SkyrimPrefs.ini (the game started in windowed mode by default)

It runs like a cham for me, stable and performant.

Can't get the NPC voices. Everything else works. Any Idea's?

For me, installing faudio via winetricks, did the trick. It enabled character voices and background music.
That's the terminal command:
WINEPREFIX=<path_to_your_wine_prefix> winetricks faudio

Nice to see Skyrim finally on GOG.

As to Linux, the game runs out of the box ... I mean cable ... on wine (Debian Bookworm).

I installed the winbind package.
I start 'wine ./SkyrimSE.exe' from a terminal.

work fin in debian bookworm
1er install wine 8.0 https://wiki.winehq.org/Debian
2em install PlayOnlinux sudo apt install playonlinux
3em install vulkan driver for amd sudo apt install libvulkan1 mesa-vulkan-drivers vulkan-tools
4em install Skyrim via PlayOneLinux in 64bit OS
5em install DXVK in the Skyrim Wine install .

Fedora 37, Wine 8.2
All I needed to do was install faudio (latest) to get character speech.

Othwise ran almost perfect. May be some screen size issues but just changed res in Skyrim Launcher.

Aha, if you say so. This is the percentage of all steam accounts that use linux, divided by linux version. This statistics is from the last 2 or 3 months. The first column is the percentage, the second column is by how much that percengage has changed.

https://i.imgur.com/1LTABNf.png

The active Steam users monthly are 120 million. Which means that the Archers like me are 12 million - at least, not counting those not using Steam. If any developer wants to miss that share of users, then they're fools bc even if half of these 12 million can and are willing to pay 60 euro for a game, that's 360 million euro. Some of us buy Windows game on a special occasion. I, like many others, say "No Tux - no bux" and I only buy games with native linux support. The rest I'll just find them cracked or I'll wait for the game to become so cheap that it won't bring any profit to the MS' a$$kissing developer - they won't support my OS, I won't support and respect their work. Simple.

I think you may be reading it wrong. In February Steam said Linux users were 1.27% of total users. I think you are looking at percentages just among the 1.27% of Linux users divided up by distro. So Arch makes up 10% of the users who use Linux, not who use Steam.

So Arch is not 10% of 120 Million. Arch is 10% of 1.5 Million or maybe 150K.

I can't say if the numbers are accurate, but I believe that's what they are reporting.