As the proud and excited owner of a shiny new Valve Index kit to go with my almost-new all-AMD rig, I thought I’d outline the journey to getting it all working, exclusively on Linux.
Now bear in mind that I’m not amazingly Linux-savvy. I’ve been using it since the early 2000’s, sure, and full time, exclusively, since 2013, but I’m not very interested in learning the guts of this stuff. I’m extremely technical as a network nerd, but my O/S is just a tool to let me run cool things. I want to be a “normal” consumer of that O/S and if things don’t work out of the box, I take a dim view of it and I don’t have a lot of patience for terminal hacks or “compiling my own kernel”.
Why is that important? Because when it comes to the Valve Index on Linux, absolutely nothing works out of the box... and yet it’s still (mostly) a success story. Here are some of the hoops I had to jump through to get this stuff working (again, mostly).
My system:
- Distribution: Mint 19.3
- Desktop Environment: Cinnamon
- RAM: 32GB
- CPU Model: AMD 3900X
- GPU Model: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
You can also see my specs in my profile or by clicking “View PC info” under my avatar in any of my comments, but I’ve listed them here so that this article notes them statically as those during my experience with the Index.
Edit: I'm also using Kernel 5.7.8 from Mainline here, which is important given the hardware I'm using. Also, the OIBAF PPA puts me on Mesa 20.2 at the time of writing.
Unboxing
It’s so pretty! The presentation and unboxing experience is very Apple-like or Google Pixel-like in that it tries to get your buy in just from opening the box! There’s a real wow-factor at play here. It’s a HUGE box, bigger than it needs to be probably, but the presentation is great.
(The HMD visor is so shiny and new that you can see me taking the photo in the third shot!)
There’s not many pictures from here on out, because trying to capture a VR experience with a screenshot (or even a video) is like trying to taste food with your nose pinched.
So, let’s get started!
First Attempt
The “Getting Started” card is pretty basic actually. In summary:
- Basestations are plugged into a power outlet, front and back of room - check
- Headset (HMD) is plugged into Displayport and USB3, and powered - check
- Controllers are on - check
- Enabled the Steam beta - check
- SteamVR is downloaded - check
Let’s do this! In Steam, I change my “games” filter to “games and tools”, then run SteamVR. Nothing happens. But wait! I see a light from the HMD. Putting it on, I can see a basic, default, VR environment - a grid on the floor, with mountains in the distance, stars overhead and a moon hanging directly above me. Head tracking is fine, and everything is nice and clear, but I can’t actually do anything and I certainly haven’t defined my “play area”, so I’m reluctant to actually launch a VR game at this point, for fear of walking into a table, wall, or through the french windows while they’re closed!
Taking the HMD off, I can see that I have a bunch of errors on my Steam client about how “SteamVR failed to initialize”. Okay then.
The errors must have taken a few seconds to pop up, or they did so as a result of my putting the HMD on. Hmmm.
So… to Google!
Second Attempt
Well, it looks like SteamVR also has a beta branch, which you activate like any game. Go to SteamVR, right click and choose Properties, then hit the Betas tab:
Which to choose though? Well, I’m on Linux, so the answer is pretty obvious! The “temp” worries me, but it’s the only Linux entry, so I choose it anyway. It downloads, I run SteamVR again, it asks for my sudo password (surprising!), and off we go.
Much better!
Now, I get a pop up on the desktop screen asking me to step through a set up process, including defining my play area. Basically, you stand in the centre of your “space”, point your controller at the screen and pull the trigger, then lay both controllers on the ground, then finally you move the controller around the edges of your space, holding down the trigger, to form a virtual box. This box must be at least 1.5m wide and about 2m in length, otherwise the program complains that it’s too small. I had to rejig my room a bit to accommodate that! I think there’s supposed to be a way around that minimum size, but this version of SteamVR literally won’t you press the “next” button unless you hit the minimum, so that’s what I did.
Having done so, I could put on the HMD and I was back at the default landscape. But now there’s an option in the bottom bar called “SteamVR Home”. I click on it with my emulated laser-pointer controller and finally got my first taste of how absolutely incredible VR can be when it’s “done right”.
SteamVR Home is like BigPicture mode, but for VR. It emulates a room which has a balcony space outside overlooking a distant mountain range. Butterflies flutter by, and you can customise the room and the balcony/garden area in a variety of ways. You also have an “avatar” and can invite friends to your room for chat, or as a party set up for games.
I customised my avatar, drew weird shapes with my painting tool, threw the Portal companion cube around a bit, watching it bounce around. It wasn’t until later that I discovered that Steam Home seems to have a problem saving environments, which is a shame. Frankly, until that’s fixed, there’s literally no point in using Home at all. Later on, I’ll end up disabling it completely, which is pretty disappointing.
But I’m here for now, so I tried to launch a game. Any game. But no dice. I could “view details” of games, but there was no launch button. So what’s going on?
Taking off the headset, I see more errors on the desktop. Sheesh. This looks serious.
So… to Google!
Third Attempt
Looked like I already had a lot of these installed, but as the error notes, it’s the 32-bit versions I need. So after a bit of searching on the web and via Synaptic, I get this to go away with a series of apt commands. In summary:
sudo apt install libva-x11-2:i386 libva2:i386 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:i386 libxtst6:i386 libgtk2.0-0:i386 libbz2-1.0:i386 libvdpau1:i386
And for good measure, I also do:
sudo apt install libvulkan1:i386 mesa-vulkan-drivers:i386 vulkan-utils:i386
After all that, I’m not getting any errors anymore, which is great. And I have a “Launch game” option in SteamVR Home now! Which does… nothing. At all.
So… (surprise!) to Google!
Fourth Attempt
I’m going to quickly summarise about an hour of frustrating googling/launching/killing/launching/googling here, but ultimately, I resorted to the tried and tested “have you tried switching it off and back on again” method of nerd troubleshooting.
And it almost, kind of, worked.
I start Moss from inside SteamVR Home, and my launch button now fades the Home environment away, and I’m now in the default environment, with a floating banner that says “Up Next: Moss”.
However, after a disappointing couple of minutes, it’s clearly not doing anything.
So… (you know the drill by now) to Google!
Fifth Attempt
Okay, so it looks like the main issue is that a lot of the games I’m trying to launch are Windows only and perhaps they have to be launched directly from Steam? It looks like SteamVR on Linux doesn’t know how to handle Proton titles from “within” the SteamVR environment.
So, I fire up SteamVR, leaving it in the default environment (not SteamVR Home), then I hit the “play” button on Moss on my desktop.
It works! Almost. No sound! But the game launched and it’s my first “real” VR gaming experience. I don’t spend long with Moss though, as it’s clear that it’s a narrative-driven experience and I don’t want to ruin it by playing without sound.
So why are my Index speakers not working?
So… to Google!
Sixth Attempt
Well, this was over an hour of trying various things - mainly running
tail -f /var/log/kern.log
... and then unplugging the USB3 connector and plugging it back in, and watching the output in the terminal. It’s definitely recognising all the devices - the HMD, the twin cameras on the HMD, the microphone, the speakers… but for some reason that's not translating to an actual device in my sound control panel.
Long (really, really long, another hour or two maybe) story short - it looks like my multi-monitor set up was interfering here. I noticed that the speakers’ description is “HDMI / DP 5”, which is the same port number my second screen uses. When I unplugged my second monitor, the Index speakers appeared in my sound’s control panel. I have sound!
Perhaps this issue is related to https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/issues/348
Who knows? Who cares! They work!
Kind of… they’re actually crackling and hissing on certain channels. I notice this in Moss when certain music plays, on the sound effect when you push/pull objects, and most annoying of all, when the narrator speaks.
So… to Google!
Seventh Attempt
Okay, quicker fix for this one. A weird fix, but it works. All you have to do after starting SteamVR, is start the PulseAudio Volume Control (I had to install it first, of course, it’s rarely included by default, at least on Ubuntu derivatives). And, that’s it. That’s all you do. You go from hissing/crackling sound to crystal clear sound on your Index… by opening that app. I have no words.
Later on, I’ll discover that by changing my primary, now singular monitor from HDMI to DisplayPort, I seem to get pretty consistent, crystal-clear sound without resorting to opening the Pulse Audio volume control. But for now, I’m just delighted it works.
It’s time to go big. It’s time to try Half Life Alyx.
Or not. Starting the game fails almost immediately with a vriniterror_init_interfacenotfound error. You know what that means? Yep.
So… to Google!
Eighth Attempt
At this point, I’ve probably had the VR set up for around 10 hours, most of which is actually with the HMD sat on my desk as I troubleshoot what the bloody hell is wrong with it. So I’m properly gutted that one of the biggest reasons I bought a VR kit, Half-Life Alyx, doesn’t even start.
After googling for about 20 minutes, all I’ve really found is a Steam Forums post noting that they had to update SteamVR before Alyx would launch. My SteamVR is already up to date though, albeit I’m still on the Linux_Temp build.
I’m desperate though. I can force an update if I change beta tabs! I switch back to SteamVR_beta, wait for the 500Mb download to complete, restart my PC to give it a clean slate, enter my sudo password again (yeah, that’s still weird) and finally start Alyx.
It works.
Indeed, not only does Alyx now work, but my SteamVR “settings” app works too. In fact, so does the desktop reprojection option! So does “reset seating/standing position”! In fact, everything seems to be working now (except the volume slider for some reason)!
Arrival: VR
I’ve now spent around 20 hours in VR, which is a crucial tipping point for me - it took me around 10 hours of soul-destroying googling to get this far. I can’t stress enough the weird dichotomy of running VR on Linux. On one hand, I paid £900 for the full kit, only to spend over a full working day wrestling with awful, incomprehensible issues for which I had little to no context.
On the other hand, now that it’s largely up and running, it’s easily the best money I’ve spent in a long time, because when you use a high quality HMD on a powerful PC and run “built-for-VR” games and software… it’s mind blowing. Truly, literally, game changing.
It’s not perfect, by a long way. The whole “getting started” experience is, as you can see, appalling. Especially on Linux. And even then there’s stuff that just doesn’t work, either well, or at all:
- The cameras don’t work, as they’re tied to a D3D11 interface which fails on start up. Ironically, you can run guvcview and play about with them there - they’re just standard v4l2 cameras after all! Hopefully they get this fixed soon, but they'd have to rewrite that D3D11 dependency, so I don't expect that to happen quickly.
- The volume slider on the “Dashboard” does nothing. You have to modify the volume setting on your desktop.
- You can’t turn off the basestations yet, so make sure you can reach a plug/switch for them.
- Steam Home doesn’t save any settings/changes you make within it, rendering it largely useless.
- You can’t launch games from Steam Home, because it doesn’t seem to understand Proton.
- Two of “The Lab” experiences crash out - “Robot Repair” and “Secret Lab”. They just fail, no idea why. All the others work though. This is also common on Windows, but none of the Windows fixes seem to work on Linux.
- I can’t use my second monitor any more. This is probably my biggest gripe right now.
- The Index head phones crackle until you launch pavucontrol (although this appears to be fixed by not using any HDMI on my system at all).
- Finally, when you run SteamVR, the sound device appears in your sound panel, but it doesn’t switch to that output. Pulseaudio does has an option to auto-switch to “newly detected devices”, but something about the way that SteamVR creates the output channel seems to bypass this. After starting SteamVR, you have to switch the sound output manually.
But in the grand scheme of things, I’m finally really pleased with the overall result. In fact, there’s only one thing that still annoys me (other than losing my multi-monitor set up), and it’s the noise the basestations make when they’re on. It’s a high pitch, and apparently not everyone can hear it, but I appear to be one of the “lucky” few who not only hears it, but can easily hear it from about 3m away. For me it’s not subtle and only starting a game would distract you from the noise they make. So, basestations definitely off while not in use, sadly, which is a bit of a pain given the lack of remote power options on Linux. I have to literally unplug them.
Do I have any regrets? None at all now that I’m “here”. But good god, Valve have a long, long road before this stuff is mainstream. I’m thinking years, given their rate of progress so far. The out of box experience is just simply diabolically poor.
Is this the future of gaming? Yes and no. Yes, once you’ve experienced VR first hand, you’ll realise how fundamentally important and immersive it is. But no, not at this price, and certainly not with this level of hassle from a technical perspective. Also, arguably headsets need to get lighter, and potentially lose the wires too, which is still the biggest restriction/annoyance you’ll face in VR.
The jury is still out on whether VR could be good in an FPS environment too. Apparently Killing Floor 2 has VR support? I’ll maybe give that a shot. Or Dying Light, perhaps? I haven’t tried anything in VR that features traditional movement yet - it’s all jump-based movement, which isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. But I suspect that traditional movement might cause motion sickness, so we’ll see.
But other games work amazingly well in VR. Moss, for example, is just spellbinding. And Elite Dangerous feels like a completely different game in VR.
I just can’t stress it enough, the difference VR makes. You know when you start an FPS game it’s stuck on 1024x768, 70 FOV and with motion blur? Then you figure out how to get 1920x1080, 100 FOV with no motion blur and you’ve gone from a game you literally can’t play to a really beautiful, engaging experience?
Imagine that, but multiplied by a hundred. The idea of playing “flat” Elite Dangerous is now utterly laughable. Like, why would you restrict yourself so needlessly?? I’m being facetious to hammer home the point, because it’s hard to put into words otherwise. It’s THAT spectacular a jump.
To sum up, if you:
- Have the money
- Have the PC
- Have the technical skill
- Have the patience
...then VR is a fantastic experience when it’s all working. But you have to have all four, I think, before it’s a sure fire recommendation.
Appendix
Here's the games I've tried that work near-enough perfectly:
- Half-life: Alyx
- Beat Saber
- Moss
- Smashbox Arena
- The Lab (although noting that two experiments crash)
- Elite Dangerous
- Space Pirate Trainer
- Superhot VR
- Gorn
- Waltz of the Wizard
- Sheaf - Together EP
And a couple of games that don't work:
- Project Cars 2 doesn't recognise the HMD at all.
- Overload doesn't recognise the HMD at all.
I'm gonna upgrade to Mint 20 today and retry some of my bullet points to see if I can solve them. I might switch from OIBAF to the Steam ACO branch too, to see if that helps.Steam's ACO repo/branch is quite a bit behind Mesa master these days and there's no PPA available for Ubuntu 20.04. All the work seems to go into upstream Mesa now, and ACO will actually be the default compiler in the upcoming Mesa 20.2 release.
I like Kisak's PPA myself. That's what I've been running with my 5700 XT. Latest stable Mesa with a bunch of patches and backports. New Mesa versions tend to be available very soon after release.
That linux_temp branch should be removed though. It was created to quickly distribute a fix for a critical issue and hasn't been updated since. It would have saved you hours of messing around.
Also there with the base station noise. Not a pleasant sound and I need to put up my headset sound quite a bit to drown it out. However, headset does switch for me these days. Although pulse has messed that up again if my main monitor went to sleep and then came back with pulse switching my audio over to the monitor (which can't actually play sound), but that's entirely a pulseaudio problem.
I also have no issues starting proton games from SteamVR home. First starts can be a bit weird though since it has that dependency install thing.
I'm gonna upgrade to Mint 20 today and retry some of my bullet points to see if I can solve them. I might switch from OIBAF to the Steam ACO branch too, to see if that helps.Steam's ACO repo/branch is quite a bit behind Mesa master these days and there's no PPA available for Ubuntu 20.04. All the work seems to go into upstream Mesa now, and ACO will actually be the default compiler in the upcoming Mesa 20.2 release.
I like Kisak's PPA myself. That's what I've been running with my 5700 XT. Latest stable Mesa with a bunch of patches and backports. New Mesa versions tend to be available very soon after release.
Thanks. I've used OIBAF for a while now, but since my upgrade to Mint 20 is now complete, I'm re-adding PPAs and I think I'll give Kisak a shot. I can always swap over if I notice any regressions.
God, Mint's upgrade process is just crap. Liam noted to me that until recently, there wasn't an upgrade process - you were encouraged to do a full re-install each new (LTS) release. And it shows. But it's done now, and hopefully they'll eventually put the same polish and beauty on the upgrade process that they do for the rest of the O/S.
Also, don't get used to Elite Dangerous on VR too much, as the next big Odyssey expansion will not support it.
I think this experience should be added to the wiki.
Also, don't get used to Elite Dangerous on VR too much, as the next big Odyssey expansion will not support it.
I'll look into putting some of it into a wiki. As Patola notes, everyone's experience is different, but it would certainly be useful to create a central resource for this stuff. Hunting the web for it all was definitely an issue, and made worse by out of date information.
slaapliedje Aug 12, 2020
I went through the same attempts you made, had an AMD rig and bought the Valve Index, and I strongly disagree with you, my experience on Ubuntu 20.04 was almost completely seamless out of the box, only thing I had to change is the order of DP connections on my GPU otherwise the PC would not boot.It boots fine, the problem is that your PC is outputting to the Index, and not your normal monitors. If you'd picked up the headset, the desktop would be there. I know this because I'd ran into it myself and happened to have the Index sitting on the table at the right angle to see it lit up!
Please reassess what you consider "mainstream". Mint is higher on distrowatch than Ubuntu for instance and used to be number one there. Does it mean it's more popular? Probably not, but it is pretty popular and mainstream. Also, with the same package base it's basically Ubuntu 18.04 with some different skinning, tooling and without some weird ubuntu choices.Distrowatch is not a good measure of a distribution being mainstream or popular. For Steam specifically, the Steam Hardware Survey is much more relevant and in there Ubuntu 20.04 is the supreme leader, with almost 20%, Ubuntu 18.04 being second with ~13%. But specifically, Ubuntu is the distro officially supported by Steam and the games (besides SteamOS that is almost irrelevant these days), and we would assume that's where they test their games to work. Valve was going to drop support for Ubuntu due to the 32-bit-libs debacle, but gave up on it when Canonical took steps to extend the longevity of these libraries -- and 20.04 mostly works with them yet.
I am not saying I agree with Canonical, I am not saying I like the power they get from being a "standard" to follow because I recognize how wrongly they leverage this power, I am not saying I wish everyone to use Ubuntu and I myself am pretty disappointed with Canonical (I expressed my anger towards them in some messages, you might find those occasionally), but let's be real, it is close enough to a good standard desktop experience on Linux, and I find it sensible that developers use it for their testing and support. I would even recommend it to new users even though I am myself moving away from it.
This is exactly why I believe the Linux ecosystem needs to address its incredible fragmentation. From my persective I don't consider Ubuntu the standard or a standard at all. At best they're ~40% of 3% and that's tiny and in no way automatically defaults them to a standard. In fact since they're so far off from upstream development (with their own odd customized riddling the OS) they can't be a Linux standard. Linux doesn't have a go to standard. That's one of our problems.
Excellent write up Scaine. I've been following VR for a while, watching it slowly mature. I played around on a friend's VIVE a few years ago and enjoyed it but felt it still had a long way to go and that experience was on Windows. There is slow progress.
I'm curious if you or others using VR in the thread have vision issues or wear glasses? I'm farsighted and not sure how well my eyes would do for long stints wearing the headset.
This is exactly why I believe the Linux ecosystem needs to address its incredible fragmentation.
As if this has never been discussed before... Make a start and name the standard init system, the standard desktop environment, the standard package manager, the standard release cycle. Shall it be AppArmor or SELinux? What's the standard file system? Or the standard sandboxing solution?
From my persective I don't consider Ubuntu the standard or a standard at all. At best they're ~40% of 3% and that's tiny and in no way automatically defaults them to a standard.
Who cares what you think? It's mere facts: The most widespread distribution is *Ubuntu. Neither is it of any interest, how much they contribute upstream, and as far as OS customization goes - there hasn't been a lot going on in this direction over the last few years.
Yes, there is no "standard" distro and there will never be one, hence developers target the most popular distribution. Period.
And I just can't enjoy my desktop when it's Gnome3. It doesn't gel, despite my giving it 6 months to do so.
But Mint! Holy cow, what a slick, beautiful experience it is. Better... better(!) than Unity, in my opinion. I have fallen in love with my desktop all over again. So, giving up Mint for a slightly better VR experience isn't on the cards, I'm afraid!
I was in a similar position to you. I had Cinnamon on my laptop because, at the time I got it, the high-DPI support was best, and I was getting increasingly annoyed by Gnome 3 on my desktop.
When I built my new desktop I gave KDE a try. Within a week I decided to switch my laptop to KDE as well, since I liked it so much more.
In particular, and the reason I'm mentioning it, the out-of-the-box audio configuration for setting device priorities - and having different priorities for different classes of audio application if you want that - is way better than what you get on the GTK side, since they had all that already for Phonon.
If you do get itchy feet to try something different, that's the direction that I'd suggest you try.
slaapliedje Aug 12, 2020
I think this experience should be added to the wiki.Doesn't matter, what's to stop you from just lifting off the headset to play when you walk around?
Also, don't get used to Elite Dangerous on VR too much, as the next big Odyssey expansion will not support it.
Also, Elite Dangerous in VR is AMAZING! I'd give up walking around for it. Then again I also have a Thrustmaster Warthog with full rudders that I bought specifically for the game.
slaapliedje Aug 12, 2020
Weird, as that's exactly what it was doing on mine.Yes, that's exactly what I thought was happening, but no, it was not booting, nor accepting keys, nor outputting to the headset, nor going to the UEFI menus and waiting some confirmation. If I turned the PC on with the Index Display Port plugged in the first slot, it hung. I tested that for a few hours.I went through the same attempts you made, had an AMD rig and bought the Valve Index, and I strongly disagree with you, my experience on Ubuntu 20.04 was almost completely seamless out of the box, only thing I had to change is the order of DP connections on my GPU otherwise the PC would not boot.It boots fine, the problem is that your PC is outputting to the Index, and not your normal monitors. If you'd picked up the headset, the desktop would be there. I know this because I'd ran into it myself and happened to have the Index sitting on the table at the right angle to see it lit up!
Granted I also have a 2080 RTX, so maybe it behaved differently. I am still kind of annoyed that I had ordered the USB C cable for that so I wouldn't have to use a Display Port + USB connection for the Index, but then Valve canceled that cable.
slaapliedje Aug 12, 2020
Off Topic:See this is the reason we like Linux though. WE all have different use cases. Me, I love Gnome 3. It's so minimal and stays out of my way so I can focus on the task at hand, rather than me fiddling with the desktop to make it how I like it...
And I just can't enjoy my desktop when it's Gnome3. It doesn't gel, despite my giving it 6 months to do so.
But Mint! Holy cow, what a slick, beautiful experience it is. Better... better(!) than Unity, in my opinion. I have fallen in love with my desktop all over again. So, giving up Mint for a slightly better VR experience isn't on the cards, I'm afraid!
I was in a similar position to you. I had Cinnamon on my laptop because, at the time I got it, the high-DPI support was best, and I was getting increasingly annoyed by Gnome 3 on my desktop.
When I built my new desktop I gave KDE a try. Within a week I decided to switch my laptop to KDE as well, since I liked it so much more.
In particular, and the reason I'm mentioning it, the out-of-the-box audio configuration for setting device priorities - and having different priorities for different classes of audio application if you want that - is way better than what you get on the GTK side, since they had all that already for Phonon.
If you do get itchy feet to try something different, that's the direction that I'd suggest you try.
Mind you, I have been using Gnome since it was pre-1.0 days... I remember the initial KDE layout was pretty damn close to just being Windows and I wanted to get away from that. Then a funny thing happened, KDE seemed to be the model for the upgraded looks of Windows 7... I still occasionally try to give KDE a chance, but then it annoys me for one reason or another and I go back to Gnome.
But we're all different with different needs / wants / workflow. So I'm not going to belittle someone else for choosing what DE they run. I save that for people who use macs and Windows :P
slaapliedje Aug 12, 2020
Who cares what you think? It's mere facts: The most widespread distribution is *Ubuntu. Neither is it of any interest, how much they contribute upstream, and as far as OS customization goes - there hasn't been a lot going on in this direction over the last few years.I think it's not exactly the most "popular" distribution, but the most famous desktop-oriented distribution. Ubuntu still gets that vibe although it has been renouncing that "mission" in favor of IoT and the cloud and due to its attempts to succeed in the enterprise -- looking like a desktop distro makes it look like "less serious", like if a good working and leisure environment makes you less productive.
Yes, there is no "standard" distro and there will never be one, hence developers target the most popular distribution. Period.
What's sad is that Red Hat at one point came out and said they were absolutely uninterested in doing anything for the desktop... but then repeatedly kept hiring Gnome developers... Ubuntu lost their vision long ago. They used to be all about trying to get Linux on the desktop, and it was supposed to be 'Debian with a 6 month release schedule'. They dropped that idea long ago and broke compatibility with Debian and started trying to go out on their own and do things that were sometimes good, but other times rather crap. I was a big supporter of them when they first crept around, but now much less so and I prefer things like Mint or Pop_OS. Ubuntu based distros that do things 'right'.
orochi_kyo Aug 12, 2020
I can hardly tell something working out of the box when it comes to Linux gaming, even with Proton on Steam, you need to config first the Steamplay, enable Windows games to show on your library, but all these VR guys are trying to downplaying the author of the article claiming they got their VR to work "out of the box" when VR is not officially supported yet on Linux neither by Valve or any other VR company.
Pretty much like the antiDRM folks, the fact VR guys are so vocal in this forum and other forums just show how desperate both groups are to get attention, the first ones because they live in a world when Devs has no rights to protect their IPs from pirates, the second ones because they want to shove their way to play games down our throats.
I'm glad the article warns possible buyers of the hassle of VR, not quite ready to work out of the box on Linux, instead of being misled by the hype of those who are desperate to have more games for their VR devices.
I’m thinking about getting an index myself, eventually in combination with one of the soon to be released nvidia cards. I’m currently just running an Intel I7-6850K. Is that processor still strong enough?It definitely is. I recently changed from a Ryzen 7 2700 to a Ryzen 7 3700X and I can ensure you CPU time is not a bottleneck on VR games.
I’m also considering just the headset and two base stations but not the controllers since I’m mostly interested in racing games (like ACC) and games like ED but not so much in FPS. I guess the controllers aren’t needed for completing the setup?If you are really serious about using VR for racing games, yeah, it could work... But you would not able to even use SteamVR Home very well (although it works with a gamepad). I think the discomfort of using something "incomplete" would propel you to buy the haptic controllers less than a week after you got your equipment working. After all, they are what makes the VR experience really immersive, the physical sensation of using your hands and fingers, and the awareness of your body the game/application gets from inferring from your hands and head positions and orientation.
For the record, I use a G29 racing wheel with gearbox with three driving games in VR: Euro Truck Simulator 2, American Truck Simulator and Distance. I recently got GRIP: Combat racing which uses a third-person view and I have not decided if I want to play it with the wheel or joystick.
About async reprojection, how much limiting is the non existence of that feature for nvidia owners?It's not exactly limiting, it just steals from the sense of fluidity. It would not even be an issue if your FPS are high enough to not skip frames (in the case of Index, 120Hz or 144Hz if you're in overclocked mode), but since VR is so taxing to the GPU, you'll mostly be skipping at least a few frames, and async reprojection can really keep the illusion of movement continuous, while with an NVIDIA there's that loose sense of interruption which improves a bit by changing to legacy reprojection.
Thanks a lot for the detailed reply!
Nice to hear that my GPU is probably fine for now, I’m not really in the mood to do a full system update ;)
Regarding the controllers, yeah, I’m torn. The movement of my right shoulder is somewhat limited. I’m perfectly capable of operating a controller or steering wheel with both hands, but don’t ask me to put a nail with a hammer into something at the level of my shoulder or higher :). So while I have the full control in my left hand, I’m not sure how useful the controllers are with limited movement on the right side. But may be you are correct that I would miss them pretty soon, at least for trying it out :).
About async reprojection, getting 120fps in Assetto Corsa Competizione sounds kind of challenging on Linux, so yeah, I guess I would miss that feature. (With the assumption that it VR works at all in ACC, the last GitHub posting in the Proton issue tracker indicates that it doesn’t yet works). Is there any response from Nvidia about this?
Last edited by jens on 12 August 2020 at 6:41 pm UTC
I don't want to be that guy, but this "it worked for me straight out of the box" comments IMO are mostly are desperate screams looking to promote a technology
So you're saying... I'm lying?
thought on just a small base of gamers, not only because the price but because just a few think it could be cool to change the casual way most gamers play, in a couch or a desk when you can stop from playing without detaching anything from your body when you want to go somewhere else.
What has this to do with anything? But yes VR gaming is a niche, nobody claimed otherwise, but VR is a larger niche, counted in users, than Linux gamers. Just to put that into perspective.
Without it being of any relevance to this particular discussion at all.
I can hardly tell something working out of the box when it comes to Linux gaming, even with Proton on Steam, you need to config first the Steamplay, enable Windows games to show on your libraryYou need to do that once - yes. You also need to install the Steam client, before that. Once.
After that you will have a lot of games who will run without modifications. "Out of the box".
all these VR guys are trying to downplaying the author of the article
Absolutely not. I am just sorry to read that he encountered a lot of issues, and quite frankly I personally were surprised by the amount. I thought that was the state of Linux VR like two years ago on the Vive - not on the Index today.
My own experience was that I was up and running much sooner than what I was prepared for. I entered the SteamVR lobby right away. Believe it, or not.
And by the way, Linux is an officially supported platform for Valve Index and SteamVR. Just check the Store page.
the fact VR guys are so vocal in this forum and other forums just show how desperate both groups are to get attention
"Desperate"... Or maybe just enthusiastic? For me VR has been a revelation, a long time dream ever since I envied the holodeck on Star Trek. We are a segment gamers who really love what we experience and want to share that enthusiasm - just like anyone else being enthusiastic about something they love.
they want to shove their way to play games down our throats.
What on earth are you on?!
Last edited by Beamboom on 12 August 2020 at 7:49 pm UTC
slaapliedje Aug 12, 2020
I don't want to be that guy, but this "it worked for me straight out of the box" comments IMO are mostly are desperate screams looking to promote a technology thought on just a small base of gamers, not only because the price but because just a few think it could be cool to change the casual way most gamers play, in a couch or a desk when you can stop from playing without detaching anything from your body when you want to go somewhere else.Fairly certain SteamVR is officially supported on Linux by Valve. As there is a 'beta' branch and 'normal' one. Just as there is under Windows.
I can hardly tell something working out of the box when it comes to Linux gaming, even with Proton on Steam, you need to config first the Steamplay, enable Windows games to show on your library, but all these VR guys are trying to downplaying the author of the article claiming they got their VR to work "out of the box" when VR is not officially supported yet on Linux neither by Valve or any other VR company.
Pretty much like the antiDRM folks, the fact VR guys are so vocal in this forum and other forums just show how desperate both groups are to get attention, the first ones because they live in a world when Devs has no rights to protect their IPs from pirates, the second ones because they want to shove their way to play games down our throats.
I'm glad the article warns possible buyers of the hassle of VR, not quite ready to work out of the box on Linux, instead of being misled by the hype of those who are desperate to have more games for their VR devices.
The 'out of the box' comments are usually based on people who have already had their setup for a while, most likely already ran into some other thing that required 32bit libraries to be installed (I think Lutris might as well?).
The OP admitted right off that he was by no means a Linux Guru, and that he very much didn't want to dig into the guts of the system. So it was a good article from that perspective. I mean SteamVR works pretty much 'out of the box' for me on my Debian system as well, but that's only because I've already previously installed the 32bit stuff for Steam and other things. Only thing to gather from this is that it's quite possible the dependencies of the Steam package differ between Debian / Ubuntu / Mint, as it seems Ubuntu has now moved steam to a snap? (Need confirmation on that) and that leaves Mint probably having to package their own for 20.04, which could be the cause of the dependency discrepancy from it 'just working' on Debian. Though I did recently do a re-install (wanted to play with a new distro, always end up going back to Debian though...) and I might be missing some of the libraries now.
As to your other note about DRM and companies deserving to protect their IP. You know, that's fine, I have no problem with developers trying to protect their hard work. What I have a problem with is the publishers (who ultimately are the ones who put DRM on your system) creating such intrusive DRM as to create kernel level drivers that create instability and privacy concerns. I'm not one to go 'boo, Steam has DRM!' as I think it's one of the least invasive forms. I do complain about the anti-cheat stuff that should find a better way of working over 'let's just scan the user's entire system to see what they have...' Especially when a lot of that software is developed in countries that have far less ethical standards than most of us are comfortable with.
Avehicle7887 Aug 12, 2020
This may ruffle some feathers but I don't like Steam and having to depend on such a platform to run VR isn't my cup of tea. I would welcome any suggestions for a "game client agnostic" method.
My dependency issues for the 32-bit libraries was definitely Mint doing their own thing, deviating from the Ubuntu base too much. But other things like the Pulseaudio crackling - other people had experienced that, for example, and some of the solutions to this and other issues really amaze me - like, moving from HDMI to DP, or running pavucontrol (just, running it... nothing else).
So basically, the people who had great first time experiences, I suspect, were running largely un-modified Ubuntu, single-screen, on DP. Which was about as far from my position as you can get!
Off Topic:
And I just can't enjoy my desktop when it's Gnome3. It doesn't gel, despite my giving it 6 months to do so.
But Mint! Holy cow, what a slick, beautiful experience it is. Better... better(!) than Unity, in my opinion. I have fallen in love with my desktop all over again. So, giving up Mint for a slightly better VR experience isn't on the cards, I'm afraid!
I was in a similar position to you. I had Cinnamon on my laptop because, at the time I got it, the high-DPI support was best, and I was getting increasingly annoyed by Gnome 3 on my desktop.
When I built my new desktop I gave KDE a try. Within a week I decided to switch my laptop to KDE as well, since I liked it so much more.
In particular, and the reason I'm mentioning it, the out-of-the-box audio configuration for setting device priorities - and having different priorities for different classes of audio application if you want that - is way better than what you get on the GTK side, since they had all that already for Phonon.
If you do get itchy feet to try something different, that's the direction that I'd suggest you try.
While I was disilluioned by Gnome3 on my primary PC for that 6 months I mentioned in another comnent... I actually ran KDE (I think it was Kubuntu, or KDE Neon, one of the two) on my laptop.
Two things put me off using it. First, the KDE devs have a funny attitude about Nvidia, and at the time, my primary PC was running a GTX1080, so I couldn't see myself using it.
But second, and most importantly, I've been a gnome-fanboi since 2005! I know it inside and out. It's familiar. And while certain things were really nice in KDE, other things were a pain. One thing in particular I hated is that both Kate (the text editor) and Dolphin (the file manager) are crippled to disallow running as sudo. Now, I get it - they're trying to promote good behaviour. But when an O/S makes it THIS hard to do what I want, it's become something I really resent. It thinks it knows better than I do.
If there were a simple('sh) fix for this behaviour, I'd have shrugged my shoulders and continued to use KDE. But it wasn't simple. It was painful. The absolute simplest way around this was to, I shit you not, install thunar and gedit/xed. That felt like ridiculous overkill for the five or six tasks I need admin for when I'm installing a new O/S I'm trying to fall in love with. It put me on the back foot with KDE right from the start. So when the papercuts began, I felt them more keenly. I hated that every app had to have a K in it. I hated how there's no "desktop" and I had to create a desktop widget for the 3 or 4 files I temporarily use the desktop for. I hated how confusing and convoluted the control panel is (better than KDE3, but still a mess). There was more, but I moved on.
I'll give it another try at some point, I'm sure. I like to check in with DE's and distros on my laptop, I usually test at around two a year. I'm overdue for another shot at Manjaro. Serebit won't shut up about Budgie. I want to see what the fuss is about Elementary. And I haven't used XFCE in over 5 years.
But Mint will take some beating. I love it. It feels good, it looks amazing, and it performs wonderfully. But you never know!
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