I thought this was cool news - new Steam hardware announcement, including the new Steam Frame VR headset and Steam Machine, both featuring KDE Plasma. I never thought I’d see KDE featured on a mainstream VR headset, but I’m super stoked!
Even the new Steam Machine they are promoting as a mainstream “PC” for use, maybe this will help bring more Linux to desktop numbers as well beyond Steam Deck.
Here’s to hope there’s a port of SteamOS with Plasma to Meta VR headsets as well then as similar hardware. I really wanted to use one for productivity purposes (vr desktop), but I can’t bring myself to actually want use anything from Zuck.
In theory it should end up being the full display/monitor, system, and interaction via 6dof camera tracking hands or joysticks, not so much a pass-through like old vive or steam vr originally, more like Meta Quest 3 but with a immutable debian/steamos. We’ll see as reviews start leaking out hopefully soon.
I suspect the arm version and the VR headset form factor shouldn’t be too different from a normal steamdeck, just adding VR bits for human interaction and probably some augmented reality. While steamdeck hardware defaults to the steamos ui, their system mode allows to switch to a full-ish kde interface that while immutable still, allows for adding flatpak/appimage apps to the desktop side, and some real hacking like any other immutable linux distro.
Add Valve’s investment in Fex for bringing wine x86 translation to arm for gaming, I’m super excited.
If you just want to see your desktop extended in VR, try “Immersed” service/application with any standalone VR headset like a Meta Quest 3. I bought one to try to use a few years ago as a replacement to sitting in a desk (at the time I was having health issues to be bed-bound), and while Immersed worked pretty well to extend even my 3x 4k desktop monitor to it virtually, I could never get passed the meta/fakebook aspect of everything else with the headset. Even eschewing all of the fakebook services features and integrations, i could never get passed that to use more, so I’m hoping maybe the Valve Frame reinvigorate me to try that again with less F^HZuckery involved.
Best case I’m hoping Valve or the community will release the arm version steamos ported to the Meta Quest 3 to make the hardware usable again as it’s mostly the same qualcomm snapdragon chip still at the heart minus the eye tracking cameras (only meta quest pro had that).