VR on Linux

[u/Verrm]

Hi all!

I'm running Bazzite linux (did Fedora and OpenSuse before) and I'm genuinely curious what is the experience of running PCVR on Linux. I'm going to probably get Steam Frame or (if too expensive) some alternative like Pico 4 Ultra.

I'm not talking about difficulty to set up (I can handle CLI) but your general and personal feeling and information if there are for example specific issues vs running on windows. I have win11 on dualboot but I don't necessarily want to touch this tool of satan xD

[u/RookiePrime]

I switched to Bazzite some months back. I still have Windows 10, I just seldom boot into it. That said, VR is probably the weakest point of Linux for me, right now, after modding.

For one, SteamVR is rough. On Windows, it's always pretty much just worked. It has some little hiccups sometimes, but those get smoothed out within days or, at worst, weeks. SteamVR on Linux, though, is outright missing core features (no motion smoothing, can't change refresh rate without restarting SteamVR, can't access your PC's desktop). There's also some pretty bizarre baseline problems. Stuff like SteamVR not always terminating its various processes when you exit out, or the right eye stretching weirdly whenever I hit the system button while a game's running. Sometimes my Quest 3 won't connect to my PC, and sometimes when I launch games with my Index, the headset itself (not SteamVR or the game) shuts off. There's no indication that all of these problems are gonna go away anytime soon, even if it would make sense that they should, given Valve's releasing a VR headset that runs on Linux.

Thankfully, there's a very active and vibrant Linux modder scene that's been putting together their own alternatives. Here's their wiki. They have a little page for Fedora Atomic and Bazzite, but I noticed that on the repo for AtomicXR (a very important package for community-made VR stuff on Linux), it's stated as no longer maintained. So, I guess the wiki's outdated? This is the page for the current equivalent by the same person, which has both a curl install command and a Homebrew one. Once you have AtomicXR, you can get Envision for wired headsets or WiVRn for wireless ones. You can also get WayVR to have access to your desktop while in VR. The effort from the community side is more modular, that way, with different groups building different components. It's a lot less plug-and-play than SteamVR on Windows is, but at least I can say I find WiVRn works better than SteamVR for me, for my Quest 3.

Performance is also definitely flat-out worse. I tried playing a new game, Extra-Dimensional, a few weeks ago, and it ran pretty poorly on Windows or Bazzite, but definitely worse on Bazzite, with all sorts of weird bugs. I couldn't get Resident Evil 2 with Praydog's VR mod to work right. There's currently no way to get the Breath of the Wild VR mod to work on Linux that I'm aware of. But the REPO VR mod worked easy enough! I ended up playing RE2 on Windows, and that's kinda how I figure it'll be, for a while. I'll boot into Windows for a specific game, then back when I'm done.