Refreshing to see a great journalist who also isn’t a complete brown noser.

I certainly have not! Thanks for informing me.

I’ve got a Quest 3, and it is the sole reason for my Windows partition to exist. The only way to get the frames from your PC to your headset is through the FOSS Air Light VR. While I do commend the tireless efforts of the volunteers who built it, it is very much not a painless experience to get it working properly. Once set up, it’s more stable than I expected it to be, but I still need to connect the Quest twice every time I want to use it.

I have not played enough games with it yet to say for sure, but if they don’t have native Linux binaries, I can’t guarantee you a playable, let alone comfortable experience. Among Us VR and IEYTD gave me a flickering and nauseating mess, which isn’t too bad on its own, but I could not find anyone who had the same problem or a solution for it (but now with my broader knowledge I guess that my problem is having an Nvidia GTX 1650). Very few people game on Linux, and even fewer play VR games. Hopefully Valve can save the day again if and when they come out with their standalone Index successor.

I suspect that you’re a newbie to VR (me too honestly, but probably not nearly as much). I didn’t get the Quest 3 myself (it was my sibling’s birthday gift). After using it for almost a year, I’ve decided that I won’t get a standalone headset for myself. There’s enough hurdles to play VR already, like needing a bunch of empty space to not destroy your controllers and your home, the cost, the motion sickness, the computing power etc. With how I use VR, the Quest 3 just isn’t that great. The only money Zuck will ever get from me is from my cold, dead hands, so I buy my games off of Steam. This means that every time I want to play VR, I need to make sure that my headset and controllers are charged and updated (controllers as well!), make sure that they are all connected to the same Wifi network as my PC, launch ALVR, launch ALVR again, and pray that the game I want to play works at all. I feel lucky if I can have any fun at all on Linux with VR.

When there are more than enough VR games that I can enjoy out there and I have enough money for it, I’ll look into getting my own setup for it as well. With my current experience with standalone, I’m eyeing the Bigscreen Beyond. It’s super lightweight, has high-res OLED displays and is wired. It is also about twice as expensive as the Quest 3 even without controllers or base stations, but it seems to solve all of my afforementioned problems with standalone, which in my mind makes it worth more than twice as much. To solve the issues of being tethered to a wire and a need for lots of space, I could also get a treadmill. The KatVR ones use lubricated shoes with optical sensors, like those on a mouse, to run (more slip and slide) on a shallow bowl. It’s surprisingly cheap(ish) for what it does, costing about 1000 bucks. While these two devices along with a Valve Index controller and base station kit costs more than three grand, I don’t expect it to provide anything less than a grand VR gaming experience.

My experience with the Quest 3 on Linux was trash compared to my nearly seamless experience with desktop gaming. I don’t know if a different headset could prevent these problems. I can only hope that you will find a great option.

My first introduction to programmimg was Scratch when I was ~10 years old. I can’t think of any more child friendly resources than that.

You forgot to sacrifice your firstborn beforehand

I’ve only talked (video call) to my grandparents once after the war started two years ago. The first second was already tense and the last was infinitely worse. I hoped that they would have known better than to believe everything that they saw on TV.

Beethoven sold out, man.

They also forgot to add the paid DLC to the Linux version, so I had to use the Windows version anyway. However, it’s still always nice to have options!

git: 'hype' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

That was what surprised me the most. The storefront that claims to buy games that won’t ever break due to DRM doesn’t have a Linux launcher.

It’s a lot easier to design when the only payout are pixels on a screen.

Countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have already banned loot boxes and gacha systems

Did they really? I certainly know that the lootboxes aren’t allowed here (rip my TF2 weapon paints), but I still could spend 10 euros on Genshin Impact, even if I had to use MasterCard.

I’m probably biased, because I’ve only really seen well-made advertisements posted here, but MAN are some of these older ones good.

I’m very intrigued. Could you please explain it? Even if you abandoned it, you still learned valuable knowledge.

Thanks, Steve.

That would make sense if the PCIe or SATA traces would interfere with the GPU.

If it’s just YouTube that’s an issue, have you searched for vaapi in about:config? That ancient CPU probably can’t handle the video with software decoding.

I myself have a Quest 3. I use Air Light VR as a streamer, which only worked after I added something to do with a vrmonitor.sh to the SteamVR command line. Half Life: Alyx runs natively and works just as well, but I’ve had bad luck with most other games, primarily because Steam Cloud didn’t synchronize the Windows saves to my Linux machine. VR even on Windows is already a PITA to set up, and I just don’t have the willpower to get it working properly on Linux. This is the only reason why I even keep the waste of space that is my Windows partition.

1. Depends on how much crap you’re willing to put up with. It’ll all be worth it in the end! (Pro tip: disable secure boot in BIOS)

2. I wrote a whole guide on the two options, but then accidentally deleted my comment. You can either install Linux on another drive, or shrink your NTFS partition and install Linux alongside it. You can always access NTFS from Linux, but not the other way around (by default). If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, you should really look it all up. I would personally just backup and wipe, you can always reinstall Windows if you want to.

3. Have you heard of Valve’s Steam Deck? It’s a handheld gaming device that can play nearly every PC game, and it runs Linux! Valve made gaming on Linux an absolute breeze thanks to Proton. There are some popular games that don’t work, either because Tim Sweeney hates Linux (yes, really) or because the anti-cheat won’t accept Linux, but I only know about Destiny 2 and Rust that have that problem. Easy Anticheat works just fine, I play Apex Legends and Deep Rock Galactic with no issues!

4. If you have AMD, you don’t even have to think about it. Their drivers are part of the Linux kernel. Nvidia is not impossible to use, but you might have some issues. I experience random desktop environment crashes that I can only attribute to their drivers, but it only happens on startup sometimes, which is the least annoying it could be. If you choose a distro that doesn’t mind automatically installing non-free software, you probably won’t need to think about it either. The open source driver, Nouveau, works fine but performs awfully in games (or at least it did a year ago).

If you just want some clear instructions: backup your files, wipe your disk and install Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. It’s easy peasy to use and getting the proprietary graphics drivers is only a few clicks away. Just configure your Steam games to run through Proton and you might not even tell the difference.

It is, but you must be invited to playtest it.