A fresh Proton Experimental update from Valve has landed fixing up issues with two games for Linux / Steam Deck so here's what's new.
  • Kraiden
    12•2 days ago

    Cool! What’s VR on Linux like generally? I’d like to get a headset again, but not if it means going back to Windows

    • @bisbyEnglish
      6•1 day ago

      Random broken things and weird tinkering to get some things working. And even when they work, not quite as good as windows.

      Most overlays don’t work because they are tied to windows specific windows capture things. On KDE wayland, the default “view desktop” from SteamVR doesnt even work.

      But if youre looking for some very chill things, it’s generally passable. I’ve been playing beat saber, which is fast paced (at least for the hand tracking) and proton handles it perfectly. From what I can tell, proton can handle VR games just fine, there’s just some work to clean up the SteamVR interface in general.

      I’m still delusionally hoping that the Valve Deckard is shipping soon and that when that drops, there will be a big SteamVR 3 linux update (kinda like how SteamOS 3 came out with the steam deck), and the headset will run linux itself so naturally they will have to ship all their linux VR improvements, and we’ll see linux VR suddenly become mega viable.

      tl;dr - working, depending on your level of tolerance for slight jank, and what games you want to play.

    • @[email protected]English
      6•2 days ago

      It’s minimally functional, I’m dual booting for vr. It felt like there was a frame of tracking lag which got me motion sick in a static scene. I found a forum post suggesting it was a vsync timing delay that steamvr normally accounts for, but you can workaround by playing with numbers in a configuration file. I gave up there, but I ran into some other issues too.

      • Motion smoothing is not supported
      • It doesn’t automatically switch audio output
      • Base station sleep mode doesn’t work
      • Performance was generally worse than windows, pistol whip had regular frame spikes

      I’ve got the gen 1 vive and a 1070, so other headsets or better gpu driver compatibility could fix that.

      • @bisbyEnglish
        6•1 day ago

        I have a separate PC for VR (with an old Vega64 in it) on my valve index. Just a week or two ago I got fed up with something on Windows 10 (i think it was trying to get me to upgrade to windows 11 maybe?) and installed bazzite.

        I started with HORRIBLE performance issues. Like could barely run beat saber smoothly issues. And then I changed something minor around (Disabling the VR Home was I think the biggest thing, it’s like it was constantly running in the background or something), and ran some script i found online (https://gist.github.com/galister/a85135f4a3aca5208ba4091069ab2222 - i think it was this one, but disclaimer, i have not looked deeply at what this does, I was running this on a fresh gaming only distro so I had nothing to lose), and suddenly performance was just fine. I’m sure this isn’t motion smoothing, but going from stuttery to smooth made me think of this. And a Vega64 is pretty old, and pre-dates any modern “rdna” AMD improvements. But it is GCN at least. I might

        Audio switching on Bazzite does work. In fact it works more reliably than it did on windows for me. I feel like “using a gaming dedicated distro” can go a long way in making gaming things work, and this is a dedicated gaming PC. YMMV

        Base station auto sleep mode does not work, but https://github.com/ShayBox/Lighthouse this CLI script can solve that. Just set something to run lighthouse --state on and lighthouse --state standby and you’re good.

        Performance is generally worse than windows, and some things won’t work (OVR toolkit requires some windows specific things, so naturally doesnt work). But on windows, the first time i launch steamvr for any session (its not just per boot, its just more like “if the headset has been off for more than an hour”), the headset screen wouldnt turn on. Put the headset on, i can see the tracking is working via the mirroring on the display, but the headset doesnt light up. “Restart headset” and then it works. Every time. Doesn’t happen on linux. And with bazzite, the power button does a quick sleep just like on a steam deck, and the index still works reliably after the computer wakes from sleep.

        I don’t do a lot of VR, i just regularly play beat saber for exercise. And it works well for that. I’m perfectly happy sticking with bazzite for VR workouts. I havent really tried any other games, but would be willing to test drive anything for compatibility if anyone cares about something specific.

    • @okamiueruEnglish
      2•2 days ago

      I too would like to know!

    • Sips'English
      13•2 days ago

      AFAIK The Finals doesn’t have VR. Think they strictly meant VR support only for No Man’s Sky.