I am mulling over this as my project for the long weekend.
Currently my SteamVR won’t talk to ALVR. But I do have ALVR on my Quest 3. I am thinking that if I can just get SteamVR to talk to ALVR, I’ll be set.
I really want to get it working. I really want to get SkyrimVR as well with some good mods. Half Life Alyx is too scary for me :(. I hate having to boot up Win10 to play VR. Knowing there’s a bajillion daemons running around and sucking up my data, giving it to Microsoft only to regurgitate it to force feed me ads, makes me sick.
Anyway, my question is… Am I insane? Has anyone actually managed to get PCVR working on linux or is it a completely unfeasible project that I should drop now before I wind up with PTSD?
Thank you in advance!
I’m just waiting for Valve to support their new Quest SteamVR app with Linux hosts. Once they do I can destroy my Windows 256gb install with impunity.
Damn when I saw the update news for it I was hoping it had linux support especially considering the amount of other Linux stuff valve has going on. I feel ripped off…
An engineer at Valve said they’re working on Linux support for it, so it’s definitely something they’ve got their eye on.
That’s good. VR on Lennox has been unsexy so far
I got PCVR working on Manjaro (my main installation is NixOS and I installed Manjaro to see if VR would work) on my Valve Index, but for some reason audio sounded like it was bass boosted a ton and games ran at 30 fps. IMO PCVR on Linux just isn’t there yet. The steam vr dashboard didn’t work at all either, might’ve been because of the new Steam VR 2.0 not prioritizing Linux use at all.
Not sure what the experience is like on quest, but I would think its not too far off from my Valve Index experience.
Thank you so much for sharing.
That is a really good point. Is it really worth getting pcvr to work if the performance is bad? Maybe it’s worth waiting until it has better support (or until someone smarter than me gets fed up and just builds something & puts it on Git!).
I think performance may vary depending on your setup. My experience is definitely not universal, but I’ve never experienced VR that works well on Linux yet. IMO you should keep trying and see if you can get it working, but if not Valve could fix VR on Linux when they finish the rumored Deckard headset.
I did manage to get ALVR working. Can’t tell you what’s all needed. But sometimes you just have to find the right version. And SteamVR needs access to some devices. it should ask for root permissions on first run.
Other things to play around with are the video codecs. Or using the flatpak version or a normal system install of Steam.
I don’t have my PC at the moment, so I couldn’t give you specifics. But it definitely worked with my Quest 1.
I almost got it to work on Nobara. It requires a lot of work but it can work with the right settings.
