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Comment by teach | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I've been Linux-only on the desktop since the early aughts and trying to get the Valve Index working was so frustrating and inconsistent I eventually gave up. It sits collecting dust and I've still never played more than the first fifteen minutes of HL: Alyx (because no game is worth installing Windows for).

Very much looking forward to maybe actually being able to use VR on my gaming computer.

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I love the Steam Deck because it is almost entirely a consumer electronics experience. I mean, maybe for 10% of the games I have to edit an .INI file to have a perfect experience, but for the most part I can pick it up and play and not fight with configuration files and shell scripts the way I do at work and with my hobbies. I've seen Windows-based devices that compete with it at Best Buy and I'm kinda shocked that, for a demo, they drop you on an ordinary Windows desktop with visual scaling appropriate for a 20x bigger screen and it is not obvious how to play a game -- such a fail!

Overall I like the experience of installing and running games on the MQ3, I can very much see a Steam-based device that is just as nice or nicer.

In general the steam deck is what made me comfortable switching to pc for gaming. I'm a couch and controller person and the old steam big picture mode was horrible. Then steam deck came around, and valve knocked the new bpm out of the park.

That made me get into playing games on linux on a desktop pc. Even when I have to run windows, I use the xbox game mode to launch steam bpm without opening windows explorer. It's a surprisingly great experience and the idea is ripped straight out of steam os.

Just echo'ing the other comment.

I'm on arch, and with nearly no tinkering my index just works.

Only low level knowledge I think would be useful is the different VR runtimes. SteamVR vs Monado

Can you elaborate on what your setup is? I have tinkered plenty and there are multiple issues I'm still dealing with on my Arch machine, despite being on a setup that Valve claims is supported (KDE Wayland, Nvidia), namely:

- SteamVR won't see my Index unless I power cycle it

- The in-overlay desktop view does not work at all, either shows all black or doesn't render at all, so I can't control my desktop from VR which is a massive pain

- The SteamVR Home environment (the startup app) crashes immediately even if launched manually

Not the same person, but in case it helps, monitor dbus for denied flatpak permissions and use flatseal to grant them? (Could try allowing everything in flatseal just to rule it out)

I don't use arch btw, but on fedora i have often found setroubleshoot useful for non-flatpak apps

I'm sorry you're missing out on Alyx - it's not the greatest game ever made, but it's up there.

Fortunately I've already played through Alyx a few years back (and it really is an amazing experience). These are issues I'm having since moving my rig away from Windows a few months ago. Even then, games are still playable on this setup, but the points above add a lot of friction that I'd really like to get rid of.

I'm using Arch-packaged Steam, so it's not running in flatpak. I suspect both the headset not detected and desktop view being unavailable issues are Wayland-related, but the Steam Frame itself is running Arch+KDE, and KDE is dropping X11 very soon, so I'm confused that this setup is not functional even in the latest version of SteamVR - it should be what the Frame is running, modulo the CPU architecture.

VR on linux has really turned a corner in the past 3 years. Last I played in vr with linux it was perfectly acceptable.

Yeah, I used my Index on my Gentoo Linux machine like six months ago and it worked fine. FWIW, I'm using an AMD video card. Perhaps it doesn't work at all on Nvidia hardware, but -absent sabotage from Nvidia- there's no reason why the type of video card should matter at all... the thing's a wide-ass screen with some sensors attached that the graphics card has absolutely nothing to do with.

Even the Frame doesn't support Linux properly. You cannot do streaming from a Linux machine, it must be a Windows machine. (yet).

I'm sick of pretending Valve cares about Linux. Their own games have major issues with Linux.

Every CS2 update breaks something, last time it was the inventory screens which were completely broken for like 2 weeks.

Left 4 Dead 2 has major frame pacing and stutter issues on the Native Build & Proton doesn't let you play multiplayer.

Counter Strike Dev Tools only runs on Windows.

You can't stream from a Linux box to the Frame? Where did you hear that? Given that you can stream between Linux boxes using Steam, I find that surprising.

Linus said it on the leaked TechQuickie video from a 2 days ago.

I think it's a little dishonest to say they don't care. They made proton, they put out patches for their games on Linux fairly frequently.. in comparison to 80% of companies they go above and beyond.

I think this is just a symptom of Valve neglecting their (old and new) games as a whole.

> Left 4 Dead 2 has major frame pacing and stutter issues on the Native Build

Is this a common problem? I've never had it :P

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