Commenting to update: With great sadness, I tried undoing my multimonitor setup and going back to just the laptop display, This worked flawlessly! I don’t know if if the system wasn’t respecting my configs, the hardware somehow healed itself, or what. For now, I’m back in pure laptop mode (which sucks, because 22" vs 15" is a giant downgrade). However, it’s all working…
As a heavy SteamVR user the poor Linux support is one of the few things keeping me from dumping windows on my gaming PC. Fingers crossed for continued improvements
Given that Valve has been one of the driving forces for certain gaming-related Wayland changes, I’m guessing we’ll continue seeing this for a while.
(Funnily enough, some of these changes were things that NVIDIA first proposed that got rejected, but coming from an organisation with a better reputation people were more open to hearing it. Although I’d guess Valve were also more open about why the changes were needed rather than Nvidia’s “trust us bro” answers.)
I’ve had enough issues with SteamVR and instead use an openXR runtime called Monado. The result is that I have always had working async reprojection. lvra.gitlab.io is a great resource for linux vr.
Games that use OpenVR instead of OpenXR will have issues, like Alyx and The Lab. And you need a separate program for boundaries and rebinding controls.
I got VR to work super smoothly with the new NVIDIA driver, on Wayland + KDE, using Alvr wireless. I can even monitor in real-time a project in development in Godot. I’m officially done with windows.
Debian can still work, but you’d have better chances with legacy LXDE, or starting with no DE and installing IceWM.
Q4OS Trinity, antiX, and Damn Small Linux are all Debian derivatives known for being able to run on very old systems, and they’re among the most lightweight distros I know that are still functional for most purposes.
That’s a pretty confusing changelog item considering async reproduction has been straight-up broken since SteamVR 2.0. That being said, I’m thrilled that Valve seems to finally be fixing some of the long-standing issues on Linux. They also recently fixed an annoying issue with the right eye mask being uninitialized, and 2.5 along with seemingly this release has fixed issues with SteamVR Home.
Yup, their business is doing hardware reviews, which involves benchmarks and whatnot on Windows. So at least those machines will stay Windows, and probably their editing machines.
They might convert a handful of other machines, but I doubt it’ll be that many.
It would be nice to see Linux benchmarks for new hardware too. Love GN’s content but I basically ignore his benchmarks as they’re done on Windows. It shows the relative strengths of the hardware but not real world Linux performance.
He could take a bit of a gamble, do some Linux as a comparison and see if that draws viewers too, maybe some attention from those that are curious about Linux but not enough to actually delve into the topic themselves (or deterred by the reputation of Linux being complicated).
Choosing a suitable distribution might be a challenge, particularly because some distro elitists will inevitably come to dunk on his choice and he might not want the comment section to be clogged by distro wars (particularly if the majority of viewers, as you suggested, are Windows users and will find that off-putting).
You can try Void. With 4 Gb it should be a breeze. I’m rocking it on a netbook with an atom processor and 2 GB of ram and I use Firefox on it without any issues.
At this point I accept that Valve probably can’t compete with the billions poured into the Meta Quest 3, but I’m glad they understand there’s an enthusiastic audience for whatever they do next.
It seems like one of the most conspicuous contributors to recent Linux fixes works for a consulting firm presumably contracted by Valve, so it definitely seems like a coordinated effort in preparation for… something.
It’s a nice tool to have around anyway. Even for my windows VR PC. The power at my house went out yesterday and the base stations restarted into a fully on state. I didn’t have to turn on the VR PC to turn them back off, just had to open Lighthouse PM.
Q4os with Trinity desktop really needs little RAM and runs fast even on old devices. The desktop is a bit old-fashioned, but ok. You may also try lighter browsers, perhaps Palemoon.
But 4GB is actually not that little, almost all distros can run well with it, especially rather slim ones like Debian lxqt. maybe it’s really due to the hdd.
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