Heya! Sorry for taking a minute to get back to you. :)
1000000% with you on not giving a cent to meta or throwing out perfectly good hardware with plenty of life left!!! For real!
So, last time I tried, VR is a little bumpy right now. I have a Samsung Odyssey+ set that’s simply fantastic…if Microsoft weren’t deliberately turning it into a paperweight.
Wonderful strides are being made by the FOSS community however!
It’s bumpy because a lot of VR kits’ only hope right now is a project called “Monado”
(Right now it looks like your Reverb G2 is supported!)
I main OpenSUSE Tumbleweed these days, and I used this awesome bit of software called “Envision” that attempts to automate the “retrieve all the correct dependencies and build the thing” stuff.
For being so early, I was very impressed, especially since I’m no pro at compiling software and navigating Git branches and stuff. This is relatively turnkey. (In a tinkery Linux way, anyway lol)
I was able to get the headset to function this way, as in, fire up a game and see through it and look around, and you can enable hand tracking, which is really neat! But I struggled to actually select or interact with anything using it.
The real tough nut to crack is the controllers, but they have made some strides there too! There’s a branch that enables controller support, but it’s VERY janky right now, like, unusuable, but it’s cool that it’s going somewhere!
The other challenge is smoothness. Expect a little jitter here and there, it’s not so buttery smooth like it was running WMR because they did a LOT of fancy proprietary compensation and prediction code sorta stuff to make that experience work. (And to the surprise of absolutely no one, they refuse to let us folks have it.)
For Elite or DCS, since you’d just be using mouse and keyboard or a standard controller or something anyway, the headset part MIGHT be enough for you! I’d definitely encourage you to give it a shot and have a little patience with it to see if it can be acceptable for you where it’s at right now.
You can also get a lot of information and help in the “Linux VR Adventures” Discord. (Ugh, I know.) Link here if you’re interested. :)
Unless you’re savvy building a bunch of stuff yourself, I’d say check out Envision first, and use that to build Monado for your Reverb and see how that works out for you.
Thank you that’s very helpful! I’m pretty handy with software so not troubled by that, but I am lazy outside of work so I’ll likely follow your envision advice! But still sounds like a fair bit to do so I suspect I’ll kick it down the road till WMR finally goes.
I don’t blame you. It’s the only thing I’m keeping a Win10 dual-boot for right now, and to their credit, it does work quite well in Windows. We’ve had a ton of fun with our set.
In the meantime, I’m keeping up with the project but not actively tinkering with it myself, because it’s exciting but also not quite there yet. It’s at least given me hope that it can be done though! I’m confident we’ll see significant gains sooner rather than later. Hats off to them. (Once my income stabilizes I’ll gotta pitch them some funds…)
Envision has made it VERY convenient to get set up, but the whole process still saps more time than “Fire it up and play.” So maybe play with it at some point, but either way definitely keep your ear to the ground. :)
I’m hoping in the future we’ll get to use it for things like Godot XR or Blender integration. :D
How are you getting on with VR? I have a Reverb G2 and if I can play Elite and DCS on Linux I’m basically sold at this point.
I really want a new headset but nothing beats the G2 right now, without giving money to Meta which I refuse to do.
Heya! Sorry for taking a minute to get back to you. :)
1000000% with you on not giving a cent to meta or throwing out perfectly good hardware with plenty of life left!!! For real!
So, last time I tried, VR is a little bumpy right now. I have a Samsung Odyssey+ set that’s simply fantastic…if Microsoft weren’t deliberately turning it into a paperweight.
Wonderful strides are being made by the FOSS community however!
It’s bumpy because a lot of VR kits’ only hope right now is a project called “Monado”
https://monado.freedesktop.org/
(Right now it looks like your Reverb G2 is supported!)
I main OpenSUSE Tumbleweed these days, and I used this awesome bit of software called “Envision” that attempts to automate the “retrieve all the correct dependencies and build the thing” stuff.
For being so early, I was very impressed, especially since I’m no pro at compiling software and navigating Git branches and stuff. This is relatively turnkey. (In a tinkery Linux way, anyway lol)
https://lvra.gitlab.io/docs/fossvr/envision/
(The wiki here is pretty nice!)
I was able to get the headset to function this way, as in, fire up a game and see through it and look around, and you can enable hand tracking, which is really neat! But I struggled to actually select or interact with anything using it.
The real tough nut to crack is the controllers, but they have made some strides there too! There’s a branch that enables controller support, but it’s VERY janky right now, like, unusuable, but it’s cool that it’s going somewhere!
The other challenge is smoothness. Expect a little jitter here and there, it’s not so buttery smooth like it was running WMR because they did a LOT of fancy proprietary compensation and prediction code sorta stuff to make that experience work. (And to the surprise of absolutely no one, they refuse to let us folks have it.)
For Elite or DCS, since you’d just be using mouse and keyboard or a standard controller or something anyway, the headset part MIGHT be enough for you! I’d definitely encourage you to give it a shot and have a little patience with it to see if it can be acceptable for you where it’s at right now.
You can also get a lot of information and help in the “Linux VR Adventures” Discord. (Ugh, I know.) Link here if you’re interested. :)
Unless you’re savvy building a bunch of stuff yourself, I’d say check out Envision first, and use that to build Monado for your Reverb and see how that works out for you.
I hope this was helpful! :D
Thank you that’s very helpful! I’m pretty handy with software so not troubled by that, but I am lazy outside of work so I’ll likely follow your envision advice! But still sounds like a fair bit to do so I suspect I’ll kick it down the road till WMR finally goes.
Thanks again!
Sure thing! So glad I could be helpful! :D
I don’t blame you. It’s the only thing I’m keeping a Win10 dual-boot for right now, and to their credit, it does work quite well in Windows. We’ve had a ton of fun with our set.
In the meantime, I’m keeping up with the project but not actively tinkering with it myself, because it’s exciting but also not quite there yet. It’s at least given me hope that it can be done though! I’m confident we’ll see significant gains sooner rather than later. Hats off to them. (Once my income stabilizes I’ll gotta pitch them some funds…)
Envision has made it VERY convenient to get set up, but the whole process still saps more time than “Fire it up and play.” So maybe play with it at some point, but either way definitely keep your ear to the ground. :)
I’m hoping in the future we’ll get to use it for things like Godot XR or Blender integration. :D