Comment by teach
5 hours ago
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.
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
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.
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.