since furality ended, one of the things it's made clear is that if we're going to make some ambitions come true, we need better hardware than bad gaming laptop
and similarly, we need to prepare for windows 10 end of life next year, because no personal device is getting windows 11.
so, attempting to run VRC on desktop with a view to upgrading the hardware later if the basics work - desktop running a basically fresh install of fedora 40 since last week
after some kerfuffle, it basically works to some extent, but i absolutely would not call the process user friendly
and i know part of that is the sin of attempting to use a nvidia gpu on linux, but still
every step of this process is dependent on the kindness of strangers, because valve's certainly not going to tell you "hey, it looks like you're using the NVK drivers. You probably want these from this third party repository, avoid the ones on nvidia's site because they'll cause your login screen to not work"
after doing all that
i can be in an instance, with other people, with settings turned up higher than they are on laptop, without the whole thing exploding
textures are more low res than they should be, i assume some setting somewhere is wrong or something is struggling with the weak PSU in this machine
but the main problem now is just that it won't pick up on the index speakers (and possibly mic?) at all, and audio routed via monitor isn't a good experience for anyone when we have enough hearing difficulties without positional audio being downgraded to flat stereo in the wrong place
i was in the camp clamouring for deckard before now... but trying again, i'm still not sure vr on linux is ready.
obviously with a dedicated device that's been specially configured there are likely to be less issues
but OVR Toolkit breaks because it's looking for task scheduler, which isn't there
and steam's desktop view just displays a test card
attempting to exit VR pops up a window i cannot see asking which application should handle the vrmonitor file type (the vrmonitor application is not shown)
it's a lot of hassle, even as someone that cares about VR enough to try and get this all working eventually
but i might still be dragging out bad gaming laptop and windows for a bit yet.
as an update:
at the advice of friends on mastodon, installed pavucontrol - which let me change it so the audio output device from the GPU could be set to Pro Audio rather than the default HDMI out - which means audio is now working properly (at least in a solo session) even if overlays aren't, and audio is the main thing
2024.06.22 07:45:04 Log - [AT DEBUG TVManager (Home Theater (ProTV))] Forwarding event _TvMediaLoop to 1 listeners
2024.06.22 07:45:04 Log - [AT DEBUG TVManager (Home Theater (ProTV))] Forwarding event _TvDisableLoop to 1 listeners
2024.06.22 07:45:04 Log - [AT DEBUG TVManager (Home Theater (ProTV))] Ending media playback.
2024.06.22 07:45:04 Log - [AT DEBUG TVManager (Home Theater (ProTV))] Forwarding event _TvMediaEnd to 1 listeners
and then steamvr in its entirety crashed, following an earlier video player crash that only took down vrchat
this one feels machine or VR specific given that the steam deck does not normally crash in solo sessions with video players when we've been testing, but like a lot of things i have no idea where to go look to fix it.
had some more chance to troubleshoot this this evening.
installing plasma X11, and swapping the desktop session to that: well, OVR Advanced Settings now starts, which it wasn't doing before, desktop view now sort of works rather than displaying the test card (while in vrchat it only displayed the vrchat output, and not the minimize button, meaning it still functionally involved taking the headset off)
also did not require use of pavucontrol to manually set output at all
video players no longer crash, but they also no longer do anything (which is preferable, i guess)
still in the x11 session, install proton-ge, force vrchat to use it: oh hey, now they work!
have not tried proton-ge under wayland to see how that performs, but it's still progress; remains to be seen how stable this will be in a session with others
the odd thing is for some reason i thought kde on wayland was the recommended one (with GNOME wayland specifically advised against until it recently got DRM leasing, but i thought kde wayland was recommended over kde x11 too) but eh
glad the basics are working but
i am trying to imagine this process if i had no familiarity with the terminal
had never heard of wayland or x11
was not comfortable reinstalling an OS after hosing it through taking what should have been the logical action.
vr is niche. vr on linux is a niche of a niche. and it will remain so without some kind of easy onboarding process or fixed hardware target that solves all these problems - because right now, you have to be truly determined about both if you want to make them work together.
there are 16 months left until windows 10 goes end of life, and i have no idea if that'll be enough time.
anyway, now that that's done, my plan is to use some of our overtime payment for this month to upgrade a few parts in desktop
and after that
i have a very, very, very bad idea with a question no one seems to have answered