I’m actually amazed it worked as well as it did. Everything except the SteamVR overlay worked essentially out-of-the-box. We’re a long way from the days when any slightly unusual hardware required weeks of tinkering to work at all.
Would be interesting to know how this would work out on KUbuntu. I’m kinda shocked people recommend manjaro as first distribution, that’s one step away from arch. And I’ve never had to care about steam libraries on kubuntu.
The Manjaro user guide and the Arch wiki are insanely good documents. The documentation alone makes it such a great starting point because there’s high-quality places you can look.
Honestly I end up using the Arch wiki to diagnose problems in Ubuntu and macOS. It’s really understated. I would love to have a printed copy of the Arch wiki to keep on my desk as a reference manual.
Manjaro is a gateway drug for users who want to learn and are interested in the challenges and puzzles it provides. If you are ok reading docs, it can be fun and quite educational. For someone who just wants things to work, I can’t recommend it. Having said that, I got the crazy idea that I would put Ubuntu on an old machine for someone and that it would be OK. I stuck with LTS because I’ve been burned by not immediately upgrading non-lts releases. I then looked in the GUI app installer and gave up. I couldn’t put a friend who is not technical through that. The app selection was pitiful and the dearth of useful review information was just shocking. I should also mention how much I enjoy Christine’s blog posts after I adjusted to the style.
Oh I was writing more from the perspective of: My first non-windows as someone that isn’t studying IT. Like for your sister or relatives that aren’t tech people. Where it should first show that it “just works” instead of overwhelming you with issues and technical details that are only nice to see when you’re actually interested in that stuff.
Totally. I was just highly disappointed with how badly Ubuntu LTS managed to fit that description. I’ve heard there are better options, but it isn’t something I get into regularly.
Duh. Every nontrivial piece of hardware is a hell to get working on a nontrivial OS. Most standard hardware work on Ubuntu, for anything less common chances are it doesn’t work properly.
Awesome, I really hope you get it working. I respect the work you put into this stuff, it can be very frustrating and tiring. (Which I think is why many people just use windows)
It ain’t perfect on windows either. Getting full body tracking in beat saber on windows required me to unpair every VR device in the system, redraw my room boundaries, pair every device again and change what pants I was wearing so the sensors wouldn’t be occluded by them being slightly baggy. I have to adjust the maximum FPS on a per game level and if I don’t then I can be stuck with a very low frame rate in VR (it’s not motion sickness inducing, more annoying lol). Still need to figure out if my bottleneck is my CPU or my GPU because with VR it’s actually not entirely clear which one it is!
IIRC, the workaround in this github issue got my VR dashboard working in steamvr. I’ve been struggling with this as well. I can’t remember if it affected the headset, but I’ve had more luck in general with proton games launching from floating window WMs than i3 (in my case openbox). This may have been a multimonitor issue though. Good Luck!!
I’m actually amazed it worked as well as it did. Everything except the SteamVR overlay worked essentially out-of-the-box. We’re a long way from the days when any slightly unusual hardware required weeks of tinkering to work at all.
Would be interesting to know how this would work out on KUbuntu. I’m kinda shocked people recommend manjaro as first distribution, that’s one step away from arch. And I’ve never had to care about steam libraries on kubuntu.
The Manjaro user guide and the Arch wiki are insanely good documents. The documentation alone makes it such a great starting point because there’s high-quality places you can look.
Fair, the arch docs are sometimes the only place you can find information.
Honestly I end up using the Arch wiki to diagnose problems in Ubuntu and macOS. It’s really understated. I would love to have a printed copy of the Arch wiki to keep on my desk as a reference manual.
Manjaro is a gateway drug for users who want to learn and are interested in the challenges and puzzles it provides. If you are ok reading docs, it can be fun and quite educational. For someone who just wants things to work, I can’t recommend it. Having said that, I got the crazy idea that I would put Ubuntu on an old machine for someone and that it would be OK. I stuck with LTS because I’ve been burned by not immediately upgrading non-lts releases. I then looked in the GUI app installer and gave up. I couldn’t put a friend who is not technical through that. The app selection was pitiful and the dearth of useful review information was just shocking. I should also mention how much I enjoy Christine’s blog posts after I adjusted to the style.
I’ve been working on my style for a while. What do you think I should do more or less of?
Just be yourself. Your intelligence makes you unique.
Fair! Always trying to improve my craft :)
Oh I was writing more from the perspective of: My first non-windows as someone that isn’t studying IT. Like for your sister or relatives that aren’t tech people. Where it should first show that it “just works” instead of overwhelming you with issues and technical details that are only nice to see when you’re actually interested in that stuff.
Totally. I was just highly disappointed with how badly Ubuntu LTS managed to fit that description. I’ve heard there are better options, but it isn’t something I get into regularly.
Well I guess that really depends, I’m running KUbuntu LTS on 4 machines for exactly that use case..
Duh. Every nontrivial piece of hardware is a hell to get working on a nontrivial OS. Most standard hardware work on Ubuntu, for anything less common chances are it doesn’t work properly.
Part 2 of this post will include trying Ubuntu.
Awesome, I really hope you get it working. I respect the work you put into this stuff, it can be very frustrating and tiring. (Which I think is why many people just use windows)
It ain’t perfect on windows either. Getting full body tracking in beat saber on windows required me to unpair every VR device in the system, redraw my room boundaries, pair every device again and change what pants I was wearing so the sensors wouldn’t be occluded by them being slightly baggy. I have to adjust the maximum FPS on a per game level and if I don’t then I can be stuck with a very low frame rate in VR (it’s not motion sickness inducing, more annoying lol). Still need to figure out if my bottleneck is my CPU or my GPU because with VR it’s actually not entirely clear which one it is!
Perhaps the Xwayland issue is addressed by this? https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/248
IIRC, the workaround in this github issue got my VR dashboard working in steamvr. I’ve been struggling with this as well. I can’t remember if it affected the headset, but I’ve had more luck in general with proton games launching from floating window WMs than i3 (in my case openbox). This may have been a multimonitor issue though. Good Luck!!
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/issues/255#issuecomment-877844004