I was a long time Windows user, starting with XP. I only tried Linux a few years ago, and while I loved it, at the time I had to dual boot for a couple specific Windows only things (VR and flight/racing sim hardware).
A couple months ago though, I got sick of it. I figured if I really wanted to do those things, I could boot up a VM, or just force myself to be patient and wait for a proper Linux solution. So, I wiped all my drives and installed Arch. Around this time, I also got an AMD RX 7600XT, so that was a nice performance boost, plus it waranted a switch to Wayland.
Let me tell you, I have been so pleasantly surprised by basically everything I’ve tried. Cyberpunk 2077 through Heroic Launcher, for example, with 15 odd mods. Runs at a solid 80fps at 1440p on high settings, the only graphical issue I noticed was flickering volumetric clouds. This game ate my old card (the venerable GTX 1080) alive even on Windows.
Just last night, I found my joystick, an old VKB Gladiator + Kosmosima grip, plugged it in and it worked perfectly.
What has really, really impressed me though is VR. I have a Quest 2 that I used to use via Steam link to play my PC wirelessly. Obviously that isn’t an option on Linux (yet) but that’s where ALVR comes in. Sideload the client on the quest, run the streamer on the desktop, start SteamVR, and bam, it works. The first game I tried was Elite Dangerous, one of my all time favourite games and easily my favourite VR epxerience. Now, I won’t go ahead and claim it’s perfect, hence the 99% in the title. After fiddling with the settings and making sure I had hardware encoding/decoding set up right, I had very good clarity, up to 120hz refresh rate, but occasional blockiness and artifacting, especially in heavier graphical scenes, like during docking. However, out in open space, it felt just like the ED I know and love.
At this point, I’m just going to look at fiddling with some settings and hopefully smoothing out the stream, but the fact that I can play my favourite games, with my favourite hardware, with great performance and in VR, and the amount of setup is really comparable to what it is on Windows is just kind of wrinkling my brain. Plus, only a couple months ago, this wasn’t the case. Support for things that were once doomed to be dual boot material for the foreseeable future is coming along rapidly. This is a great time to be a Linux gamer.
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Yeah, a lot of expectations people have around Linux are about a decade old. I think Linux has really improved a lot in the area of gaming over the last few years even.
And as long as Linux keeps being worth supporting I think we’ll see more and more games targeted toward linux.
Hey OP, could you give a brief rundown on what settings you’re using for ALVR? I was gifted a Quest 2 and would love to get it running on Linux. I got the ALVR app sideloaded on the Quest, but the performance seems to be atrocious. I also haven’t been able to get the audio routed to the headset properly, not sure if that’s something you got working either - if so I’d love to know the secret sauce for that one too!
I left most things default. When I first set it up I played with all the settings and made everything worse lol.
I can tell you that I set the resolution to the highest setting, the refresh rate to 120hz and the bitrate to the quality settings. Everything else, I left default. I found that this resulted in the best clarity while not really making the artifacting/lag any worse. I’m still playing with it though.
If you have the option in SteamVR’s game specific settings to enable “Legacy motion smoothing”, apparently that improves things noticably. For some reason motion smoothing is completely unavailable to me though so I can’t personally attest.
I’ve heard audio was an issue, but in my case (Arch plus KDE6), it was as simple as picking my audio output in the system tray dropdown. I could stream it to my headset or send it out of my headphones I have plugged in.
Edit: I’m gonna link this becaust I found it while looking into why motion smoothing was unavailable. Apparently disabling async reprojection via a config file can give a noticable performance boost. I’ve yet to try it but I’ll add another edit when I’m back at my rig long enough to test it out.
Interesting, I’ll give it another go and try out your recommendations - thank you!!
Adding a little update. Recently reinstalled my system as things were getting cluttered. For some reason, I was unable to install ALVR (or the git version) from the AUR. When building the AUR package manually, I’d get to 99% and the terminal would just close, yay resulted in the same error.
However, the portable .tar release of the latest version works perfectly. Performance is even better, I’ve had fewer bugs/connectivity issues, and once I followed the official Settings Tutorial and this article on how to disable SteamVR Async Reprojection things have been working 99% as well as they were on Windows. I have noticed occasional quality degradation, but it was never detrimental to the experience overall. And, it’s worth noting that ALVR can function over USB with a link cable, so that should eliminate any issues caused by wireless streaming.
Just thought I’d report my experience and hopefully give some folks a push to try it out. This is a huge step for the overall Linux experience IMO, as it’s very quickly opening up an entire aspect of gaming/computing in general really that, until a few months ago, was effectively not viable outside of Windows.
Thank you for the update! I just gave it another go and don’t seem to have any audio, and it still seems quite jittery - I’ll have to play around with it some more and see what I can get working on it :)
Yeah im not sure about audio. I’m using pipewire and it seems to work fine OOTB with both the built in Quest 2 speakers, and my sound card audio
I switched from Windows to Linux during the whole Vista debacle back in 2008. For basically ten years I was out of the PC gaming scene. I fucking love Proton and what its done for Linux as a gaming platform. Now I play (almost) everything on Linux, no sweat. The only things I ever need my Windows partition for anymore are things with those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.
those shitty anticheat platforms that just assume you’re a cheater if you use Linux. Cause, you know, Linux scary.
To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.
But as a sweeping measure these anti-cheat measures are absolutely unacceptable. The only other explanation is that they just don’t want to bother with the market share still being low compared to Windows.
Personally, if a game requires anti-cheat, it’s probably not a game I’d enjoy playing. Not a big fan of competitive gameplay. But for those that are, this needs to stop. Especially with all the new bullshit Microsoft has been pulling in Windows lately.
To be fair, the people at the cutting edge of modern computing are statistically very likely to be Linux users. Therefore it’s not entirely unreasonable to have some prejudice against Linux users.
Can we drop this “linux is hackerman territory for cheats” stereotype?
Most people cheat on windows. Not cause they are technical or knowledgable… but because they have a credit card
cause they buy cheats designed for windows.
The overwhelming majority of people out there cheating are cheating using tools they bought and use on windows.
So if anything, its Windows that should be treated as the pariah dog of hackers. Cause its where the credit swiping script kiddies are.
i only switched over quite recently (a few years ago)
i swear there has been significant improvements in wifi, bluetooth, gpu support, gaming over the last 10 years that made me think it was now good enough
also there was areas where linux was outdoing windows for quite some time; system wide audio equalizer, customization generally, home services and self hosting, development tools
Linux audio is really under appreciated. I’m one of the nutjobs that still uses a PCI sound card and I’ve never had to install a third party driver. I can manually adjust the output and EQ for every port, disable or enable them on the fly, etc. The only thing I’m missing is hardware EAX support for older games but I’ve kind of accepted that’s just a dragon I’ll always be chasing.
What EQ do you use? I’ve been using Easy Effects for a while, but have been plagued by crackling and stereo sound only playing on one ear lately.
Glad ALVR worked for you on Wayland. It never did for me but it’s been a while. All Linux needs next is support from Adobe and AutoCAD and it’ll be 100% for most people
Photoshop too, unfortunately
I also recently made the switch and was pleasantly surprised at how many games I could still play, even “Windows only” titles. Though my requirements are nowhere near yours as I don’t have VR or HOTAS.
I’m still rocking an NVIDIA 1060… What’s the Linux community consensus on NVIDIA vs AMD? Because I think it’s about time to upgrade.
AMD is generally a much better experience overall, but a handful of things are worse than NVidia (off the top of my head, Ray Tracing, AI, and Emulators. AMD cards tend to have graphical glitches in emulators even on Windows. They can be mitigated, and aren’t universal but they are an issue).
In my experience, AMD is the way to go. My old GTX 1080 was a beast and put in great work, but just had too many naggling stability issues that constantly got in the way of enjoying it. Been really happy with my AMD.
AMD being preferred was my sense of the situation so it’s good to have that confirmed. Looks like I need to get more familiar with that family of cards.
AMD’s naming scheme is honestly similar to Nvidias. They have X600, X700, etc (the “X” being the generation of card, the second digit being the model).
So for example, the current gen is the 7000 series, with the 7600 being the lowest, and roughly analogous to the 4060, and the 7900 to the 4090. There are also XT versions which is AMD’s version of the Ti line. They have more VRAM, higher clocks, overclocking, etc.
I’d look at the 6700XT, or the one I have which is the 7600XT. Both have similar specs, the 7600XT is more recent with better performance in a couple areas, but the 6700XT is tried and true, and you’ll be more likely to find a good deal on it. The 7600XT only came out a couple months ago and isn’t anywhere near as well established, but IMO it performs excellent at good temps without any tweaks. Both are great for 1080p or 1440p with modern games.
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Thanks for the info. Looks like I still need to do some more research of my own lol.
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