Nolvus on Linux no longer uses Mod Organizer 2. It uses Fluorine Manager, a native Linux mod manager that reads the same instances, profiles and downloads MO2 did.

Fluorine is a native Linux binary, so it does not run under Wine itself. It still needs a Wine prefix, because Skyrim and the modding tools are Windows programs — but the manager you interact with is a normal Linux application.

Nothing you have already downloaded or installed is lost. Your mods, profiles, load order and downloaded archives are untouched by the switch.

Your Nolvus instance stays wherever you installed it. Fluorine is installed once and shared by every instance.

Nothing to do. Fluorine is part of a fresh install.

When you install a modlist, the Nolvus Dashboard downloads Fluorine before it starts building the instance. It comes from Nexus, using the same Nexus account the rest of the install uses:

• Premium accounts download it automatically.
• Free accounts get a browser window to start the download from, exactly like any other mod.

If Nexus cannot provide the file — an outage, a rate limited API key, or a free account with no browser available — the dashboard falls back to the GitHub releases automatically. You do not need to do anything differently either way.

Once the install finishes, press Play on the instance and Fluorine opens on it.

Instances created before the switch still have MO2 on disk and no Fluorine. You do not need to reinstall the modlist.

1. Open the Nolvus Dashboard and find your instance in the list.
2. Press Play.
3. The dashboard notices Fluorine is missing and offers to install it. Choose to install.
4. Wait for the download and extraction to finish. It is roughly 200 MB, downloaded once and shared by all of your instances.
5. Fluorine opens on your instance.

That is the whole migration. Behind the scenes the dashboard registers the instance with Fluorine and makes sure it has a usable configuration, so Fluorine opens your modlist rather than its own instance picker.

A few things worth knowing:

• Your mods, profiles and downloads are not touched. The migration only adds Fluorine.
• The old MO2 folder is left alone. It stays in your instance directory, unused. You can delete it once you are happy everything works.
• Close Fluorine before pressing Play again. The dashboard refuses to start a second copy.

If you want a desktop launcher that skips the dashboard, use Manage → Add Desktop Shortcut on the instance. It opens Fluorine directly on that instance.

Skyrim and many of its tools are Windows programs, and Windows has a limit of 260 characters on a file path. Your instance sits at a Linux path that Wine presents to those programs as a Windows one, so a long install path eats into that budget before Skyrim has even started. Deeply nested mods can then fail to load, or tools can fail to write files, with confusing errors.

You can install Nolvus anywhere. But if your install path is long — an external or secondary drive mounted by UUID is the usual culprit — it is worth shortening it.

Your instance directory is the folder you picked in the dashboard when you installed. It is the one with STOCK GAME, MODS and TOOLS inside it. It can be anywhere you chose — there is no fixed layout and no required parent folder — so check the actual path rather than assuming.

Create a symlink in / that points at that folder. If your instance is at:

/mnt/9c4e1f2a-6b3d-4a17-8e52-0d7fc3b91a84/Nolvus

then run:

sudo ln -s "/mnt/9c4e1f2a-6b3d-4a17-8e52-0d7fc3b91a84/Nolvus" /Nolvus

Everything in the instance is now reachable through /Nolvus, which costs 8 characters instead of 50 or more. Adjust to taste — /Nolvus, /N, whatever is short and does not collide with anything already at the root of your filesystem.

The symlink does not move or copy anything. It is a signpost, and the original path keeps working.

The symlink on its own changes nothing until Fluorine uses it. Update the paths in Fluorine so they go through it:

1. Open Fluorine on your instance.
2. Open the executables editor (Edit Executables) and change the binary paths of your tools and of the game so they start with your new short path — /Nolvus/... instead of /mnt/9c4e1f2a-.../Nolvus/....
3. If you are asked to update the registry key of the managed game, select yes.

Change them everywhere, not just for the executable that was failing. It is the total path length of the files a tool touches that matters, not the path of the tool itself.

Fluorine is native, but the game and the Windows tools it launches are not, so they need a Wine prefix. The prefix is not created until you ask for it, and until it exists Fluorine will refuse to launch the game with a message about no prefix being configured.

1. Open Settings → Wine/Proton.
2. Choose the Proton version you want to use. Known working versions are:
   • GE-Proton 10.34
   • GE-Proton 10.15
   • GE-Proton 10.10
   • proton-cachyos-10.0-20260102-slr-x86_64_v3
   • proton-cachyos-11.0-20260602 (steam linux runtime)
3. Run Initialize Wine Prefix.
4. Wait. The first run does real work — it creates the prefix and applies Fluorine's compatibility setup — so give it a few minutes.

You only do this once. The prefix is shared by every instance.

If something goes wrong, the prefix setup writes a log named prefix-setup-latest.log you can check, and you can re-run the initialization to rebuild the prefix from scratch.

Individual tools are marked to run through Proton rather than natively. If you add a tool and Fluorine tells you it is a Windows executable, open Edit Executables, enable Use Proton for it, and make sure a Proton version is selected in Settings → Wine/Proton.

Fluorine updates itself. The Nolvus Dashboard installs it once and then leaves it alone, so the dashboard is not where updates come from — if it replaced Fluorine it would overwrite whatever version Fluorine had updated itself to.

• Fluorine tells you when an update is available and offers to install it.
• To check by hand, use Check for updates now in the settings.
• Check for updates on startup controls whether it looks every time it opens.

Updates are applied in place and keep anything you have added to Fluorine's folder.

If Fluorine will not start at all, delete its folder and let the dashboard fetch it again:

rm -rf ~/.local/share/fluorine/bin

Then press Play on any instance and accept the offer to install. This removes only the Fluorine program — your Wine prefix, mods, profiles and downloads are all outside that folder and survive.

"Fluorine Manager is not installed" when pressing Play from the instance details screen. Go back to the instance list and press Play there instead. The offer to install only appears on the instance list.

"An instance of Fluorine Manager is already running!" Fluorine is still open, possibly in the background. Close it and try again.

Fluorine opens the wrong instance, or its instance picker. Launch it from the dashboard's Play button, which points Fluorine at the instance you chose, rather than from a desktop shortcut created for a different instance.

The game will not launch and Fluorine mentions a missing prefix. The Wine prefix has not been created yet. See Initialize the Wine prefix above.

Mods behave strangely, tools fail to write files, or paths look truncated. You are probably over the Windows path limit. See Keeping paths short above.