Oculus Rift Pre-Orders Start, But Linux Support Is Still Halted

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oculus Rift Pre-Orders Start, But Linux Support Is Still Halted

Oculus Rift pre-orders opened up this morning for $599 USD and an anticipated ship date of April. However, the Facebook-owned company isn't yet back to providing Linux support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Oculus-Rift-Pre-Orders

[ssokolow]

I think I'll wait until someone cooks up a driver that requires no binary blobs. (Which probably means I'll have to sacrifice positional audio)

I'm rather attached to having the only non-game closed-source stuff on my system being Flash, Dropbox, Upwork Team, my nVidia drivers, and my BIOS. (I actually kicked Skype less than a year ago and I'm looking forward to when in-browser Skype allows voice chat on my platform so I don't have to link people to an appear.in room for it. As soon as I can spare the time to hack together a solution involving inotify, rsync, and my VPS, I plan to kick Dropbox too.)

[zanny]

Megasync's client is open source under the Artistic License. I just switched to them after SpiderOak cancelled free service, and 50GB of space is pretty reasonable. The UX for syncing backups is not nearly as good but its much more workable than Dropbox's Linux client.

[kmare]

And that's exactly why I'm gonna pass on the oculus rift and go for the HTC vive, as a user/consumer and as a developer. At least till there's official support for linux/steamOS.

[schmidtbag]

So... as far as I'm aware, it's $200 more expensive than the HTC Vive, had many more years of development vs the Vive, had plenty of funding even without Facebook's involvement, ended up copying nearly everything the Vive decided on, will be shipping out later than the Vive, and is temporarily dropping Linux support...

I may be a little outdated with some of that info, but I'm definitely going for the Vive instead.

[haagch]

Palmer tweeted this: https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/sta...11865023918080

Linux support is on the roadmap post-launch

But of course there are zero specifics. Just remember how bad their linux support was back when they officially supported linux with the DK2. 3 months and 3 SDK versions delay for the closed source oculus service (required for head tracking), 10 months delay for a working unity plugin, unreal integration for linux was never released. Also the head tracking service always remained unstable (regular segfaults), and mesa support was never fixed (X errors because the sdk using glxquerydrawable when it shouldn't, several applications just showing black window content, ...). None of the audio SDK plugins/middleware (unity, fmod, vst) were released for linux.

So this time, wait until they do release linux support that does demonstrably work and is on par with the windows support. Not any earlier.

[bug77]

And that's exactly why I'm gonna pass on the oculus rift and go for the HTC vive, as a user/consumer and as a developer. At least till there's official support for linux/steamOS.

I'm gonna pass because it's too big a gamble for $600.

Palmer tweeted this: https://twitter.com/PalmerLuckey/sta...11865023918080

...

That's what UT3 said on launch. And we all know how that ended.

[Maxjen]

So... as far as I'm aware, it's $200 more expensive than the HTC Vive, had many more years of development vs the Vive, had plenty of funding even without Facebook's involvement, ended up copying nearly everything the Vive decided on, will be shipping out later than the Vive, and is temporarily dropping Linux support...

I may be a little outdated with some of that info, but I'm definitely going for the Vive instead.

There is still no announced price for the Vive, but I think it will likely be more expensive than the Rift (because the Rift is subsidized). And the Vive was delayed until April, so the Rift will ship first. But I am still leaning toward the Vive since it seems to have better technology, like tracking, input, and now the passthrough camera.

So this time, wait until they do release linux support that does demonstrably work and is on par with the windows support. Not any earlier.

Agreed. I wont spent money on a promise. But the same goes for the Vive. I wont buy it until they show working Linux support.

[kmare]

bug77 as a user I totally agree, the price is too high, but to be honest as a developer I wouldn't mind it/care that much. Cross platform official support is much more important (to me at least).

[nineinchnick]

It's ever more expensive in Europe, 699 euro. On current rate it's almost 800$. I got used to paying a bit more in euro than in dollars, but this is ridiculous.