Tags: Steam, Virtual Reality
Valve have put up SteamVR for Linux officially in Beta form and they are keen to stress that this is a development release.
You will need to run the latest Steam Beta Client for it to work at all, so be sure to opt-in if you want to play around with it.
VR on Linux will exclusively use Vulkan, so it's going to be a pretty good push for Vulkan if VR becomes more popular. Vulkan is likely one of the pieces of the puzzle that held it back, since Vulkan itself and the drivers are still so new.
On NVIDIA, you need to have the 375.27.10 "Developer Beta Driver", which can be found here. There's also this PPA for Ubuntu users. It's likely it needs some newer Vulkan extensions not found in the current stable drivers.
For AMD GPU owners, you need a very recent build of the open source radv driver (Mesa), likely from git.
Intel GPUs are not supported and it's probable it will be a long time until they are, since VR generally requires some beefy hardware to run smoothly. It's possible they may work in future, but I imagine the Intel 'anv' Vulkan driver needs more work done.
Also, you will likely need some updated udev rules, but all of that and more can be read about on their github page for it.
This is exciting, to finally see VR on Linux starting to become a real reality now. I just wish the hardware wasn't so damn expensive. It will likely be a long time before I can afford a headset myself to review.
Thanks for tweeting it to me Dennis.