cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100
Thought I’d create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people’s pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.
VR support is still pretty bad, at least for my HP Reverb G2 headset. On Windows, everything just works out of the box. Plug in the headset, start SteamVR and every single game works well.
On Linux, I have to install Envision to set-up Monado which provides the neccessary OpenXR runtime for games. But the controllers are not supported in the main Monado branch, so you’ll have to set up a specific fork of it, which is not that well documented.
It does run fine with some games, but not all of them. Half-Life: Alyx refuses to launch, for example. There doesn’t seem to be any motion smoothing, so moving your head is really rough, it almost looks like your eyes receive 24fps (even though the headset does run on 90Hz) and I get nausea after a few minutes. Tracking your surroundings also doesn’t work well, when you move around it’s all very “jumpy”.
And I wasn’t able to get the SteamVR application to run at all. I always get an error because it seems like the cameras used for motion tracking are detected as regular webcams. On some other WMR headsets a firmware update can solve that, but I already run the latest firmware on my G2.
Maybe other VR headsets work much better, but this one is in absolute alpha state and the only reason I still dual-boot into Windows. Given the fact WMR has been declared obsolete by Microsoft and removed from Windows 11 last year we might see improvements. I got my headset for 120$ which is really affordable for one that can do 2160p per eye.
To be fair, though, the very first line in the Envision Readme states:
So I absolutely knew what I was getting into and it’s great that it even (somewhat) works at all.
I had no luck trying to make my Quest2 work on Arch. At first games even won’t start with SteamVR. Tried different solutions, had to mess around with OpenXR configs, almost made it with ALVR, only to have app on the headset showing that connection is successfully established over the black screen.
Can’t wait until Steam implements SteamLink support for Linux. But that’s probably on low priority.