UPDATE: Got it working. The only thing I did differently was launching it through Steam's desktop interface, not from SteamVR Home. This seems to solve the issue. So you can disregard the rest of this thread.
I want to play this in VR, but while the game works nearly
perfectly on Linux (the green and red buttons at the start lack text)
with Wine, the game never detects the headset even if you try launching
it through SteamVR. Steam
does support
VR on Linux
(for a year or two) but only with the native Steam for Linux client.
While all SteamVR games (except Croteam's) are Windows-only, Valve
created a fork of Wine called Proton which allows Windows SteamVR games
to work on Linux. In particular, they have whitelisted Beat Saber, DOOM
VFR, and Google Earth - there are other games that work just fine,
though. You can play non-Steam games with Proton, but besides what's in
the next sentence, I don't know what other VR-compatible games aren't on
Steam so I haven't been able to test.
Vivecraft, a Minecraft mod, uses OpenVR. And
it works on Linux. That's Java, not Unity, though. Valve
open sourced one
of their recent demos,
which uses Unity, so that may be interesting to look at... but I don't
know if anyone's tried building it for Linux, and Knuckles (now Index Controllers)
aren't even out yet.
Some other useful links:
Looking into this a bit more later.
Comments
Just install Windows 10 on a partition for games, you can just use it without license or buy a cheap code on ebay for less than 3 o 4 USD. Downloading the iso is free from Microsoft itself and you can use any linux tool to burn the ISO to an USB stick and install from there. After installation you can reinstall grub to have a faster booting to Linux (much faster than the Microsoft OS selector)
Could you explain what you installed?
I added yiffalicious non-steam game to steam-runtime library but launching it does nothing.
Also I'm on arch.