Unlikely that the USB-Link feature will ever work with Linux sadly.

Maybe if you run everything within WINE including the occulus SDK and STEAM, but it also seems to depend on specific NVIDIA video-compression (at least for now, they say AMD GPU support will come at some point) and given that the NVIDIA video streaming feature isn't working on the NVIDIA Linux drivers, I have might doubts that this will work either.

But let me know if you can manage to get it to work, because in that case I might consider buying a Quest also :)

Edit: To my educated guess it looks like a Occulus S to Steam, but this is a software side "fake", not something that will work with the linux udev rules for external displays like the regular Occulus rift.

Last edited by Julius on 8 December 2019 at 1:09 pm UTC

Quoting: JuliusUnlikely that the USB-Link feature will ever work with Linux sadly.

Maybe if you run everything within WINE including the occulus SDK and STEAM, but it also seems to depend on specific NVIDIA video-compression (at least for now, they say AMD GPU support will come at some point) and given that the NVIDIA video streaming feature isn't working on the NVIDIA Linux drivers, I have might doubts that this will work either.

But let me know if you can manage to get it to work, because in that case I might consider buying a Quest also :)

Edit: To my educated guess it looks like a Occulus S to Steam, but this is a software side "fake", not something that will work with the linux udev rules for external displays like the regular Occulus rift.

I'll definitely come back and let you know if it somehow works. I'm fairly hopeful that with the steam link feature being released fairly recently we will start to see some Linux hacks for it over the next few months, but heres hoping I just plug it in and Steam tells me I own a Rift S.

The reason I got an Occulus is because it is completely usable even if linux hates it. Nothing lost if it doesn't work on Linux.

There are also some third-party solution for streaming SteamVR to Quest. ALVR is Open Source but they have no Linux developers: https://github.com/JackD83/ALVR/issues/23
Maybe Linux users should show some interest here: https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/Radeon-ReLive-VR/issues/30
or here: https://github.com/JackD83/ALVR/issues/89

It looks like the ALVR guy would prefer to keep linux support out of his own project, which is fair enough. it can be forked as he says. As it stands its probably unlikely that many Linux users will own an oculus device due to the shitty support in the past, but if as many new people as I'm expecting open up one of the oculus quests on Christmas morning, then that could change quickly. I've still not actually received mine but I've been doing lots of research like the late-thirties excited man-child I am.
What should work absolutely fine is the device itself and sideloading new apps and games from the sidequest app in Linux. Sideloading a streaming solution will of course be possible (as far as sideloading goes the oculus quest shouldn't even be aware of the OS of the system doing the sideloading), but actually streaming looks like its not going to be possible from a Linux pc just yet.
From what I can tell, with the Oculus Link, i.e. turning the device into a tethered rift S, well that's going to require contact from the device with the oculus rift app, ostensibly on a windows pc. Currently the rift desktop app setup.exe craps out almost instantly in wine with no feedback that I can work with. If we ever get over that hurdle then the next problem would be as Julius alluded to, the Nvidia drivers not being up to scratch in Linux. This would be needed to encode the stream from the pc to the correct format for the oculus to handle. With this device essentially just being a snapdragon running android...I'm hopeful that will get there.

Just a quick note to say my quest came today. It works as a standalone of course, and side-loading from sidequest on linux is great, but that's the extent of Linux compatibility for now as far as I can tell.

Following days of excited research, what will eventually work is not clear either. A desktop streaming solution would be a preference to me, once i have a 5ghz router anyway, because that way I retain the untethered experience. Currently, however, none work on Linux. An app called immersedvr stated a few months ago that Linux support was coming, although that hasn't appeared yet and they have a primary focus on the mac. I'm not sure what the extent of xrdesktop ambitions are but I doubt supporting wireless streaming to android will be coming anytime soon.
For the 'Link' functionality, i.e. wired connection to the PC, we'd need the oculus software to install. That doesn't look possible for a while. It seems to quit before I get any useful errors when installing and I've found no mention of oculus software working with wine.
Steam Link should be usable somehow, as the device is just running modified android. But I've found no solutions on the internet.

This is a very impressive piece of tech though, and I'll eat one of my hats if there isn't a lot of people getting one of these over Christmas. With more users I'd be more hopeful that this thing will work fully on Linux one day but it doesn't today unfortunately.

Thanks for the update! I'll keep watching this thread. A cheaper VR experience on Linux would be great :)

There's some news on this topic. The developers of ALVR plan to move away from the Windows-only approach and make it cross-platform: New GUI framework and the future of ALVR development

Cool. And the new Wine release added a start for usb driver support, which might mean that running the occulus home software on Wine could become feasible as well.