So we just completed our first full #VRChat session under #Linux and we have some thoughts that we wanted to share :) Long post incoming~
First off - we are honestly very impressed how far #VR has come on Linux. We remember when the Vive and Valve Index was the only headsets that would work at all, so the fact that we have not one but two wireless streaming solutions for the Quest headsets is awesome. #ALVR and #WiVRn are both amazing pieces of software, and it makes me happy to see that you can combine them with Proton to make Windows VR games work on Linux. And, all of these worked flawlessly on Wayland with an NVIDIA GPU, which honestly kind of shocks us.
That being said I want to talk about a few things - our experience with VRChat on Linux specifically, and our experience with both ALVR and WiVRn, since we used both during this play session.
(For reference sake, all playing was done on Nobara Linux 40. Our system has a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, an RTX 3080 Ti, and 32GB of DDR5.)
Starting with VRChat specifically, we did a three-hour session. We spent it with a friend, hopping around Winter VKet for a while and then settling down in a chill world. All in all, using the custom Proton-GE-RTSP fork, it worked almost exactly like it did on Windows. Video players and music worked, AudioLink worked, everything rendered correctly, and the experimental Linux build of VRCX has 99% of the functionality it does on Windows. Really impressive stuff. We did crash three times - twice in ALVR and once in WiVRn - which is suboptimal, but random crashes aren’t necessarily a Linux-only problem; although they did occur more frequently than usual. Performance was ultimately good enough, but it did look visually worse than on Windows and ran a little worse too, with more framerate drops and more inconsistent frame-pacing.
Now, as for the VR streaming solutions themselves.
ALVR was a bit more reliable out of the gate. It’s more polished and has more features, and connecting to our PC had less hangups than WiVRn. Customization is boundless (perhaps too boundless…), and we feel it is the closest thing to a “Virtual Desktop replacement” on the platform. It hooks into SteamVR, like VD, and generally ‘just works’. Visual fidelity felt ‘good enough’, but the default foveation was very aggressive, to the point of feeling almost low-res and distracting. The image also, weirdly, lacked some contrast, and looked kinda washed out. Playable, but not great. ALVR also felt smoother out of the two, but would have some really disorienting moments if the FPS dipped too much, like reprojection or motion smoothing weren’t quite working. It also crashed pretty catastrophically at one point, taking both SteamVR and VRChat with it, but we’re not really sure what caused this - the world we were in had a lot of different audio sources playing, so maybe this was an issue with Proton-GE-RTSP or SteamVR or something else. Still, it sucked.
WiVRn + Monado worked better than we’d expected. Visual fidelity was better, and the image had more contrast and looked more vivid than ALVR. However, it felt notably more jittery. Frametimes felt higher, even though the framerate was statistically higher than ALVR, almost as if it wasn’t doing any reprojection at all. It wouldn’t halve the framerate like VD or ALVR do when they can’t reach the target (in this case, 120 FPS), so the framerate would often hover around 80-90 FPS or so. Despite this, we never got that disorienting “floaty”/“shaky” feeling that ALVR gave us when it was struggling. We think it was ultimately a slightly better experience than ALVR, but not by much. That being said, because it uses Monado as its VR runtime instead of SteamVR, the “initializing/connecting” screens in between worlds didn’t render properly, which made it impossible to tell that VRC had actually crashed when we entered a world portal. We waited for about two minutes before realizing the game needed to be force-quit and restarted. Unsure if this was a VRC problem, or a WiVRn problem, but portals did work fine for us in ALVR.
At the end of it though, it was a successful VRChat session. We still have reservations - stability is lessened, both WiVRn and ALVR look worse than Virtual Desktop, and performance takes a notable hit - so we’re not sure if we’ll stick with Linux full-time. But it’s awesome that VR has come this far. We’d say that for those who are truly Windows-averse, Linux is definitely viable for social VR. It may not beat Windows just yet, but it’s amazing to see that for those who decide to switch, it’s one less thing they have to leave behind.
