Valve Publishes A SteamVR Developer Build For Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 21 February 2017 at 07:05 PM EST. 16 Comments
VALVE
Valve has begun rolling out their SteamVR Linux support by announcing today a beta/developer build of their VR support for Linux.

Valve's SteamVR for Linux page was updated today to reflect the build becoming public via the Steam beta channel, "This is a development release. It is intended to allow developers to start creating SteamVR content for Linux platforms. Limited hardware support is provided, and pre-release drivers are required. Linux support is currently only available in the "beta" branch, make sure you are using SteamVR[beta] before reporting issues."

SteamVR on Linux explicitly requires Vulkan usage and for NVIDIA it means the 375.27.10 Vulkan developer beta while the AMD support is limited to a "pre-release version" of RADV, likely meaning Mesa Git or perhaps code that hasn't yet landed in Mesa Git. Intel graphics are yet to be supported.

Great to see Valve finally make this support available in public beta after they've been working on it for months and talking about it since last year at their Steam Dev Days, hiring open-source AMD drivers to improve the support, etc. Thankfully I have a sponsor lined up so should be able to run some HTC Vive Linux tests in the near future.
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