Monado is the in-development OpenXR runtime for VR / AR on Linux and Collabora continue to make excellent progress on bringing it up to eventually support more platforms and features.

Recently, Valve released a new SteamVR Beta that was aimed at developers with initial support for the OpenXR specification and it appears they're going all-in.

This is quite exciting for the future of Virtual Reality, as Valve as now properly given their backing to the OpenXR standard and added support into SteamVR.

Collabora have today announced the release of Monado 0.2, their open source OpenXR (VR / AR) runtime for Linux.

Just like Valve said to us they would do so, Half-Life: Alyx is now available on Linux using the Vulkan graphics API.

Today the hackers over at Collabora announced the release of xrdesktop 0.14, a Valve Software sponsored effort to bring Linux desktops into the VR world.

Today Valve made quite a big announcement about the future of VR, including an entire platform being dropped.

Those crazy-smart folks over at Collabora have continued hacking away on Monado, a fully open source OpenXR (VR / AR standard) runtime for Linux. Now it's progressed quite far and it can run Blender VR.

Half-Life: Alyx, Valve's return to the Half-Life franchise in VR-only form released for Windows last month and it appears they're now preparing a Linux version.

While Half-Life: Alyx isn't on Linux (yet—it's coming), Valve are still trying to get it working as good as possible with Steam Play Proton and a new update for SteamVR is up.

As Half-Life: Alyx arrives today, just a reminder that it should hopefully be coming to Linux in a post-release update. On top of that, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive got some fancy cosmetics for it.

Today, Valve replied to our message asking about the situation with Half-Life: Alyx and Linux support and we got our answer.

Valve continue rapidly iterating on SteamVR, as they attempt to push the limits of what VR can do both on the hardware and software side with SteamVR 1.10 out now.

While the state of Virtual/Mixed/Augmented Reality (XR) is constantly in flux and improving all the time, Unity have announced with Unity 2019.3 that their built-in XR support is being deprecated.

Half-Life: Alyx is set to release in March this year, and while we don't yet know what exactly is happening with Linux support it's still an exciting time.