windows manages to keep me for two reasons creative apps and vr but today we make that one but the the road to get there was interesting but first a quick recap for people who are unfamiliar alvr streams pc vr games to your quest like oculus link but according to most people and myself it does it way better while being open source and using less resources and just so you know if i ever say i got this working that's i'm not a developer i didn't actually i'm just speaking in the sense that it is running on my machine i don't know c plus plus or rest particularly well yet and i've done no development work if you want to thank someone for how cool a lvr is you should go to their discord server not me but now we've gone through that this was the most complicated app install process i've ever been through so i'd like to take you on a journey for most apps you'll download a binary a file that will run that's the same on linux mac os and windows and it's what i did for alvr for both my linux and windows testing that will come later in the video i just went to the nightly section releases and downloaded the one for the 3rd of june but that's where things start to diverge on windows i run the installer i open lvr and it works on linux i go to the folder i double click the executable file and steamvr gives me error 307 and that's fine in this scenario i didn't think i had to be smart at all someone's already figured this out it's a problem to do with a package called mesa and it can be fixed and they've got a fix for arch which i don't use anymore and that's what i was talking about before i'm not just downloading a file that will run for mesa anymore i'm downloading the source the actual code for it modifying it and then building it compiling it back into a binary and an executable that will run but differently better for me because it'll actually work so now i've got to figure out how to do it not to an arch package but to an rpm which is what my destroyer uses it was very fun and it worked after many attempts and over an hour i was actually really shocked that anything would work because i'd lost all hope at this point but before i bore you any further let's test things how does it work there's a spider behind the camera i'm gonna get a hoover but before we try anything in linux let's just get a baseline for what windows is like and while we're on windows we'll actually be doing higher settings than on linux because for v8 encoding isn't an option there so right now the settings are 4032 by 2112 both for video encoding and the actual game rendering and i'm 130 megabits per second let's just do a built-in song this isn't about measuring scores though um though i do have a video about that up there if you are interested based on like different refresh rates i just want to compare what it actually feels like on linux versus windows and you should be able to see my uh like current latency stats on the left of the screen one thing to note though i'm on a nightly version of avr that actually has some like changes to how the latency is calculated than the normal one so my latency right now might appear really high it doesn't feel any higher than normal to me it's just that like it's being calculated differently than you might be used to but that felt pretty much normal though i did notice a bit more stuttering than usual and i think that's because i'm recording with obs using my cpu because my gpus encode is being used for this um and i thought that might help but it actually might be hindering things pay no mind to the server fps bit that i've just highlighted there that is just one key right right now um however things were definitely not perfect uh but these are the settings that i normally use that's just a recording with obs thing so i'm sorry that the stats might be a bit skewed to not being great um but generally the the total latency you'll be seeing will be about right even if the frame times and steamvr's fps graph isn't representative of normal things the general the general latency is going to be representative of normal so before we switch to linux i'm actually going to move to the settings that i'm going to be using on linux on windows that'll be changing video to just 100 both for the game and gpu uh and uh yeah gpu like video encoding and setting the refresh rate to 90. i will also be disabling this this should just be disabled anyway it should always be on that um i'll see you in a second okay so now we're 100 res 90 hertz let me check that things look proper and um those really high latency numbers that you're seeing seem [Music] honestly about representative at 90 hertz things feel not just less smooth but they just have a lot more latency and if you kind of look up and and look down with your eyes through the nose bit of the headset and you move your controller you can kind of see the controller being out of sync with the actual saber and that's not something i really get at 120. the latency is actually noticeably worse and it's been a long time since i tried 90 hertz on windows this might actually give linux some hope because i didn't remember that there was this much latency um let's go back to the same song i'm not sure if i could even do this like i i can see the discrete steps that um something close to my face is taking and things overall feel less smooth but the game is definitely still playable like oh except for when it freezes that's not my fault i hope the recording showed that wow that was i've kind of been spoiled by 120 hertz i forgot what 90 look like like i've gotten used to high refresh right on everything now my phone is 120 hertz the quest is 120 hertz my monitor is 144 my watch is 45 hertz actually um but generally i forgot 90 hertz looked like that um but it was mostly okay to play it didn't feel horrible to play it was noticeably worse than 120 hertz but other than the fact that i'm just actually worse at the game because i'm playing at a high speed if if if i was playing on a slow enough level where like 120 hertz doesn't actually increase my skill 90 hertz would feel perfectly playable um but now let's try linux i feel so dense right now i've been recording at 1080p and also my audio is just going to be from my phone because passing audio through the quest is not something i know how to do yet well i think i could do um it's just that i haven't that feels that feels a bit better than windows did um let's try this again i'm really impressed with the context that i've got now i'm really impressed um the tracking feels no worse than on windows the um the the latency it it's just it's just better this feels like what it felt like when i was trying 120 hertz on it so so i'm gonna have to check once this song is done if i'm actually trying to do 120 heads it doesn't feel as smooth but the latency feels good this isn't how i would choose to play beat saber as the experience is right now but i could play beat saber like this just fine yeah okay we're definitely at 90. i think i just lost context for how bad 90 hertz felt once you get used to 120. this feels fine um let me try the same sound again oh but sometimes that happened i don't think you would have seen that because that's an encoding thing on linux though something i've noticed is big scene changes um like i don't know if it's just a different encoder being used like the software side of it even though it's hardware accelerated encoding um i don't know if it's the different encoder being used big scene changes make everything go slow motion and speed back up again and that's not something you have on windows which is especially awkward for just loading a beat saver song i might switch to this this feels fine and another thing to note beatsaber doesn't have a linux pod this is running in proton beat saver is an extremely well-rated game on proton db everything basically just works i've never tried online but i highly doubt beat saber has anti-cheat and even if it does i doubt it's the type of entity that would care about as being on linux that just i'm like i'm just i'm not sure if it's just me getting used to 90 hertz again it's like if i if i do the controller shaking test that feels better than window i'm not sure why both of these are running on bare metal um that windows that i just showed you wasn't a virtual machine um that's really cool i might be able to i did install onward on here but that is actually not compatible i've never played the steamvr tutorial on linux i just want to try that i'm going to try another game so it works really well actually just as well as it did for me when i started using lvr on windows at the end of 2020. 90hz is fine and it's my hope though this isn't based on anything the developers say so don't get too excited i hope that for me it will reach feature parity by the end of the year like i'm fine messing with audio stuff i just need 120 hertz to be fixed and it'll basically work the same for me no matter which os i'm on there are still some problems steamvr doesn't seem to properly end most of the time so if i close alvr i can't launch it again until i restart the computer but i'm pretty sure that's a steamvr problem not an lvr one and regardless you should be excited because this is just one step closer to an open desktop steamvr isn't open steam isn't open windows isn't open the games aren't open and for what windows is like i don't just hate windows because it's proprietary windows is an impressively functional piece of software that a lot of the world relies on it's just that the day we don't need windows for those things is only getting closer anyway hopefully you enjoyed bye