decided that if we're going to potentially make a very irresponsible purchasing decision, seeing how the streaming component of ALVR runs under linux made sense, so dug out the old Quest 1.
some observations (kde plasma wayland on fedora 40)
- install went great despite an "unsupported OS" message during setup. the launcher app also handles sideloading the APK on Quest.
- after setting up and doing the necessary restart SteamVR steps, most of the streamer app's side was working but the headset was just displaying a black void - but could see tracking was working using the desktop VR mirror. thankfully there's an item in the FAQ that fixes this right up.
- i do not know how we put up with the quest 1 for so long; i was surprised at just how stark the visual difference felt when the only thing i was expecting to take the hit was resolution
- audio is broken but kind of expected this one; the streamer app does contain some instructions for fixing this we haven't yet followed.
- handtracking was a much bigger problem than i expected. the skeleton in the ALVR preview space was responding pretty much perfectly, and swapping the emulated controllers over to emulate the Index Knuckles also performed as expected, but I guess the Quest 1 is responsible for recognizing gestures and it did not want to do that properly to act as buttons. the trigger gesture (thumb and index finger) unreliably worked, but the others didn't want to work at all or would fire while trying to use something else. basic movement did not want to work at all and i ended up somehow activating Safety Mode before failing to call up the menus
i think there's a way to get this working with the lighthouses/actual index controllers but haven't done the research for that yet