I was a long time Windows user, starting with XP. I only tried Linux a few years ago, and while I loved it, at the time I had to dual boot for a couple specific Windows only things (VR and flight/racing sim hardware).
A couple months ago though, I got sick of it. I figured if I really wanted to do those things, I could boot up a VM, or just force myself to be patient and wait for a proper Linux solution. So, I wiped all my drives and installed Arch. Around this time, I also got an AMD RX 7600XT, so that was a nice performance boost, plus it waranted a switch to Wayland.
Let me tell you, I have been so pleasantly surprised by basically everything I’ve tried. Cyberpunk 2077 through Heroic Launcher, for example, with 15 odd mods. Runs at a solid 80fps at 1440p on high settings, the only graphical issue I noticed was flickering volumetric clouds. This game ate my old card (the venerable GTX 1080) alive even on Windows.
Just last night, I found my joystick, an old VKB Gladiator + Kosmosima grip, plugged it in and it worked perfectly.
What has really, really impressed me though is VR. I have a Quest 2 that I used to use via Steam link to play my PC wirelessly. Obviously that isn’t an option on Linux (yet) but that’s where ALVR comes in. Sideload the client on the quest, run the streamer on the desktop, start SteamVR, and bam, it works. The first game I tried was Elite Dangerous, one of my all time favourite games and easily my favourite VR epxerience. Now, I won’t go ahead and claim it’s perfect, hence the 99% in the title. After fiddling with the settings and making sure I had hardware encoding/decoding set up right, I had very good clarity, up to 120hz refresh rate, but occasional blockiness and artifacting, especially in heavier graphical scenes, like during docking. However, out in open space, it felt just like the ED I know and love.
At this point, I’m just going to look at fiddling with some settings and hopefully smoothing out the stream, but the fact that I can play my favourite games, with my favourite hardware, with great performance and in VR, and the amount of setup is really comparable to what it is on Windows is just kind of wrinkling my brain. Plus, only a couple months ago, this wasn’t the case. Support for things that were once doomed to be dual boot material for the foreseeable future is coming along rapidly. This is a great time to be a Linux gamer.
Adding a little update. Recently reinstalled my system as things were getting cluttered. For some reason, I was unable to install ALVR (or the git version) from the AUR. When building the AUR package manually, I’d get to 99% and the terminal would just close, yay resulted in the same error.
However, the portable .tar release of the latest version works perfectly. Performance is even better, I’ve had fewer bugs/connectivity issues, and once I followed the official Settings Tutorial and this article on how to disable SteamVR Async Reprojection things have been working 99% as well as they were on Windows. I have noticed occasional quality degradation, but it was never detrimental to the experience overall. And, it’s worth noting that ALVR can function over USB with a link cable, so that should eliminate any issues caused by wireless streaming.
Just thought I’d report my experience and hopefully give some folks a push to try it out. This is a huge step for the overall Linux experience IMO, as it’s very quickly opening up an entire aspect of gaming/computing in general really that, until a few months ago, was effectively not viable outside of Windows.
Thank you for the update! I just gave it another go and don’t seem to have any audio, and it still seems quite jittery - I’ll have to play around with it some more and see what I can get working on it :)
Yeah im not sure about audio. I’m using pipewire and it seems to work fine OOTB with both the built in Quest 2 speakers, and my sound card audio