The only thing I'd add to the "works out of the box" piece is that when I was googling for answers, there were a LOT of people who had similar issues to me. Finding the answers was only a trial because a lot of the information was quite dated, or about Vive, for example.

My dependency issues for the 32-bit libraries was definitely Mint doing their own thing, deviating from the Ubuntu base too much. But other things like the Pulseaudio crackling - other people had experienced that, for example, and some of the solutions to this and other issues really amaze me - like, moving from HDMI to DP, or running pavucontrol (just, running it... nothing else).

So basically, the people who had great first time experiences, I suspect, were running largely un-modified Ubuntu, single-screen, on DP. Which was about as far from my position as you can get! :grin:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: barottoI think this experience should be added to the wiki.

Also, don't get used to Elite Dangerous on VR too much, as the next big Odyssey expansion will not support it.

I'll look into putting some of it into a wiki. As Patola notes, everyone's experience is different, but it would certainly be useful to create a central resource for this stuff. Hunting the web for it all was definitely an issue, and made worse by out of date information.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: scaineI'm gonna upgrade to Mint 20 today and retry some of my bullet points to see if I can solve them. I might switch from OIBAF to the Steam ACO branch too, to see if that helps.

Steam's ACO repo/branch is quite a bit behind Mesa master these days and there's no PPA available for Ubuntu 20.04. All the work seems to go into upstream Mesa now, and ACO will actually be the default compiler in the upcoming Mesa 20.2 release.

I like Kisak's PPA [External Link] myself. That's what I've been running with my 5700 XT. Latest stable Mesa with a bunch of patches and backports. New Mesa versions tend to be available very soon after release.

Thanks. I've used OIBAF for a while now, but since my upgrade to Mint 20 is now complete, I'm re-adding PPAs and I think I'll give Kisak a shot. I can always swap over if I notice any regressions.

God, Mint's upgrade process is just crap. Liam noted to me that until recently, there wasn't an upgrade process - you were encouraged to do a full re-install each new (LTS) release. And it shows. But it's done now, and hopefully they'll eventually put the same polish and beauty on the upgrade process that they do for the rest of the O/S.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: fabertaweGreat article and quite entertaining :grin: I'd love to go VR but need to upgrade CPU and GPU before that can even be considered. One consolation of late(r) adoption is it should all work better by then.

One question please: do you need Pulseaudio for this? I'm running Jack but do occasionally fall back to just ALSA for some games.

Thanks! I'm afraid I can't answer your query about jack audio. I can't see that it would matter, particularly, though, as long as you have a way to switch to the Index speakers somehow, I suspect it would be fine.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Patola

Quoting: DragosakPlease reassess what you consider "mainstream". Mint is higher on distrowatch than Ubuntu for instance and used to be number one there. Does it mean it's more popular? Probably not, but it is pretty popular and mainstream. Also, with the same package base it's basically Ubuntu 18.04 with some different skinning, tooling and without some weird ubuntu choices.

Distrowatch is not a good measure of a distribution being mainstream or popular [External Link]. For Steam specifically, the Steam Hardware Survey [External Link] is much more relevant and in there Ubuntu 20.04 is the supreme leader, with almost 20%, Ubuntu 18.04 being second with ~13%. But specifically, Ubuntu is the distro officially supported by Steam and the games (besides SteamOS that is almost irrelevant these days), and we would assume that's where they test their games to work. Valve was going to drop support for Ubuntu due to the 32-bit-libs debacle, but gave up on it when Canonical took steps to extend the longevity of these libraries -- and 20.04 mostly works with them yet.

I am not saying I agree with Canonical, I am not saying I wish everyone to use Ubuntu and I myself am pretty disappointed with Canonical (I expressed my anger towards them in some messages, you might find those occasionally), but let's be real, it is close enough to a good standard desktop experience on Linux, and I find it sensible that developers use it for their testing and support. I would even recommend it to new users even though I am myself moving away from it.

Well, as an Ubuntu-only Linux'er since the Breezy Badger in 2005, and an official Ask Ubuntu "top responder", I was seriously invested. But I was gutted by the last two releases - ditching Unity was a huge blow, the adoption of Snap didn't sit well, especially after the Mir fiasco, and then the whole 32-bit support drama... oof. And I just can't enjoy my desktop when it's Gnome3. It doesn't gel, despite my giving it 6 months to do so.

But Mint! Holy cow, what a slick, beautiful experience it is. Better... better(!) than Unity, in my opinion. I have fallen in love with my desktop all over again. So, giving up Mint for a slightly better VR experience isn't on the cards, I'm afraid!

And ultimately, it's pretty much Ubuntu under the hood anyway, or so I thought. I'm gonna upgrade to Mint 20 today and retry some of my bullet points to see if I can solve them. I might switch from OIBAF to the Steam ACO branch too, to see if that helps.

I note here [External Link] that audio switching is currently unsupported, so I'd be keen to hear how you fixed that, Patola! Thanks!

I'll report back in a bit.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: PatolaI went through the same attempts you made, had an AMD rig and bought the Valve Index, and I strongly disagree with you, my experience on Ubuntu 20.04 was almost completely seamless out of the box, only thing I had to change is the order of DP connections on my GPU otherwise the PC would not boot. Thing is, you are not using the mainstream distro (Ubuntu), although you are using a derivative of one, so you are not telling the testimony of "how poor Valve Index works out of the box on Linux" but instead "how poor Valve Index works out of the box on Linux Mint". I, for one, don't think Valve should be spending money on testing all linux distros (and this it not even self-interest because I'm moving to Arch from Ubuntu). Also, you are using a backlevel Linux Mint (latest is 20), and since latest drivers and software is currently crucial to the linux gaming experience, you would have a poorer experience anyway (and this specially important to the GPU you have, Mint 19.3's default drivers can even make your GPU have a hardware fault and burn for good -- hope you at least use a newer kernel, 5.7+).

Yeah, I should have noted that in the article - because I'm using such new AMD kit, I switched to the mainline kernel [External Link], 5.7. Yesterday, I switched to 5.8. As for Mint, when I wrote this article, Mint 20 was just out and Mint takes a few weeks after release to support in-place upgrades. I was only notified of that being available a few days ago.

Quoting: PatolaWhen I ran SteamVR for the first time, it worked out of the box. Also, it seems earlier versions of SteamVR had a bug where they would not switch the default sink to the VR but in the latest SteamVR beta, it works every time (and I have an indicator app to ease switching sinks anyway, due to the many audio devices I have).

Good to know. The Mint sound chooser is pretty bog standard, so I wonder what's happening here.

Quoting: PatolaAnd last but not least, change to the "SteamVR beta" branch, not linux_temp. SteamVR beta works great, although it had a bug in Fallout 4 VR where it would not show the in-game virtual keyboard (don't know if this bug is still there).

I did, as I noted in the article. So much of this experience is "beta" though, which is kind of my point about VR on Linux generally. Things only "work out the box" if you know what you're doing - changing GPU order, going into the beta tabs, etc.

Quoting: PatolaAh! And from your games: Overload works perfectly here in VR with Proton-5.0-9. Most "VR-supported" games work this way, they only have a VR build for Windows.

I'm not sure why VR-supported games aren't detecting my SteamVR. Again, maybe this is Mint specific. I'll look into, but I have so many Made-For-VR games, that it's not really a problem (yet).

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: mborse20 hours of fiddling is soul destroying? People have it easy these days.
In my days we had to flip bits by switches manually. On a more serious note, you do have it easy these days, you have the internet, and for sure someone somewhere ran into the same problem before you do.
A luxury we didn't had. On the other side, we didn't had VR or Alyx either, so there's that.
Thanks for the article and for sticking with it, and don't despair. If after 20 days you're still stuck, then there's a problem.

My profile picture was taken about 3 years ago, but I'm nearly 50 now and for precisely the reasons you describe, I have very little patience for fiddling about with stuff. Especially stuff I've paid nearly a thousand pounds for!

I do vividly remember getting my first 14k modem and dialling into Compuserve to see if I could glean an answer to a particularly nasty Netware IPX issue I was experiencing on the company network. The internet changed everything, eh?

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: elmapulwhats sci-fi about it?

The trailer's music! :grin:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This looks superb. Reminds me a little of Rochard. Very impressive. God I love Godot.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Despite the low-res, old-school graphics, this game is such a gem. Better played with friends admittedly, and I recommend turning off the Minotaur, which is like a timed event to push you through the dungeon quickly. Without the Minotaur-timer mechanic, you can really explore each level of the dungeon and enjoy the rooms, their traps, and of course, their treasures! Great fun.

View this comment - View article - View full comments