VRChat Compatibility with Linux and VR

[peq42]

I been waiting on a few things to get fixed(specifically on Linux Mint) to make my transition to it from Windows 10, so I thought I’d make a forum post on progress so far and what I’ve faced.

My system:

• Ryzen 7 7800x3D
• Nvidia RTX 4070 ti
• (meta) Oculus Quest 2

Ram, ssd, etc are unnecesary as the only things that affect compatibility are CPU and GPU. CPU-wise I have no issues, but as of right now there is a minor GPU issue, namely performance for NVidia drivers isn’t the best.

-From what I’ve seen, Nvidia graphics performance(running the latest drivers available on Mint) is about ~10% worse than on Windows, but expected to be equal(or better, like it is with AMD currently) in the near future as NVidia has been gearing up investment. Either way, performance with my 4070 ti is more than good enough right now(90fps with few to no stutters or dips below that in a world with ~20 people, all avatars shown).

-Compatibility has been the biggest issue. ALVR is trash for NVidia users, so I went with WiVRn, and it works great so far(setup took under 5 minutes, no code, no terminal, nothing). Sadly it uses OpenXR instead of steamVR so openning the Desktop is a no go as far as I could find(I made a feature request in their github so this may change).

-SteamVR is absolutely unuseable, full of many years old bugs and no expectation from Valve to fix any of it, or make it work for people like me who have the Quest 2 and want to use it on Linux. With OpenXR and WiVRn thankfully we got a working alternative.

-VRChat overall works fine, but requires to be run using Proton Experimental(the official version, 9.0-4 won’t load videos properly). I’ve reported the issue and made a note to devs on proton’s github in the hopes whatever fixed things for experimental to be brought, without the need for any commands or extra arguments, to the next official release.

[peq42]

Feature request to WiVRn denied, but for a good reason: They want to keep compatibility and whatnot with other tools as easy and good as possible. Thankfully I been shown a tool I didn’t know called “wlx-overlay-s” that should work with WiVRn(and even steamVR, monado and others) so thats good

[peq42]

VRChat remains stable 2 weeks later with the experimental proton version, which makes me believe the final 10.0 update onward will work just fine with it.

SlimeVR however seems to not work properly. The app, I believe, was made using java and even with openjdk installed it would just display a blank screen. I’m reporting it to devs to see what its about

EDIT: Seems like that was only the flathub version. Some incompatibility with wayland? Anyway I tried the .deb on their github and it worked just fine

[peq42]

VRChat performance on Linux Mint got a bit better, with the new kernel 6.14 being available(it improves Wine/Proton performance)

The new kernel sadly didn’t fix the 1 month+ old issue with Linux Mint and some Realtek network adapters(that come in many motherboards). It still is crashing when I try making a hotspot using 5Ghz

[peq42]

new update after a while: Solarxr IPC Driver is now supported on monado! And wivrn apparently has implemented that version as of a week ago

all thats left is a feeder app, according to a contributor on github

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