One aspect of VR that I really appreciate is the increased sensation of user choice. I find that when tasked with making a decision in a Virtual Reality experience it often feels more pressing or weighted than a choice made in, say, a choose your own adventure book or even in a number of desktop oriented games. Add to that experiences that involve other people and the experience grows, leading to even more user choice.

I often wonder why the same user choice isn’t provided when it comes time to use our fancy head monitors on an Operating System outside of Microsoft’s Windows. As anyone with a foot in the gaming community knows, Microsoft’s OS certainly has a lot of relevance when it comes to the gaming community. For the longest time, Windows was the only Operating System that got the latest and greatest video game releases outside of gaming consoles such as Sony’s PlayStation systems and Microsoft’s own Xbox lineup.

Thanks to new technologies like Khronos Group’s Vulkan API and multi platform engines like Unreal and Unity, creating a game for multiple computing platforms is much easier- but why isn’t Virtual Reality gaming/use quite so lucky as its pancake counterpart? And by extension, why is being able to use VR on other operating systems important in the first place if most PC gamers use Windows?

I’m glad you asked, imaginary person!

As it stands, VR headsets for PC come in three major varieties- The Oculus Rift (and upcoming Rift S), Windows Mixed Reality Headsets such as Samsung’s HMD Odyssey, and SteamVR headsets such as the HTC Vive and Valve’s upcoming Index HMD.

At this point in time, Oculus/Facebook have expressed no intention to develop the Oculus software or device drivers for Linux or MacOS, and clearly Windows Mixed Reality will be staying integrated into the Windows platform. Valve does offer an in-development version of SteamVR that allows SteamVR headsets to function under Linux and Mac, albeit with some current limitations.

Looking at the latest Steam Hardware Survey, a very small percentage of Steam users have VR headsets in general- but of them, Oculus is currently in the lead:

Given that both Oculus Rift and Mixed Reality have a nice margin of VR users, the only Steam users that could choose actively to play on Linux or Mac are a small percentage of a small percentage of people- just two of those categories (Vive and Vive Pro). Everyone else simply doesn’t qualify.

One response someone might have to me here is “Ok, so you just answered your own question- barely anyone could even use Linux or Mac if they wanted, so as it stands it’s irrelevant!”. But that, at least to me, isn’t the case.

Don’t get me wrong, I actually like Microsoft. Windows is an OS I use fairly regularly and some things in Windows 10 are very pleasant improvements to the user experience. But as it stands, Microsoft of today doesn’t have a great record of shipping releases that are… the most stable.

Yikes.

As it stands, there is always a possibility that Microsoft could push an update that hits one VR platform or another with a critical bug, and it could hit pretty hard. Am I saying it will happen? Probably not without a fairly quick patch, but as it stands Microsoft has your PC VR experience by the balls… and the lack of user choice in finding a comparative experience in Android-based VR platforms or Sony’s PSVR doesn’t help either. Having the ability to switch to another Operating System and have a similar experience as Windows will absolutely provide a massive benefit to the VR community as a whole.

So I’ve tasked myself with one mission- find out exactly how a user like myself might go about still using VR after an imaginary Windows 10 October Update part 2.

Enter the penguin.

He waddle.

My first step was to install Linux. After doing some research, I settled upon POP! OS, a variation of Ubuntu Linux that maintains the easy user experience and great looking UI, but that comes with quicker updates to enable for a smoother gaming experience.

After prepping a thumb drive and installing POP! onto my VR computer, I started by installing Steam. I’d recommend if you follow in my footsteps that you install Steam directly from the official website as the integrated POP! Shop may not install the necessary USB perm files to enable SteamVR games/apps to work nicely with the hardware.

I also have been one of the majority using an Oculus Rift, so for the purpose of investigation I decided to get ahold of a Vive Pro kit to test everything in VR, although with the recent announcement that the Valve Index will be supporting Linux as well, I imagine this may be most relevant to those who plan on snagging an Index once it’s gone on sale.

I launched Steam and checked out the Linux VR section aaaaaaand…. well, out of my 70 game VR library, none of them natively have a Linux version. So game over, right?

WRONG!

To be continued in Part 2: Proton, where we look at the technology that may just be able to turn our Linux machine into a full VR rig, and talk about which of those 70 apps can benefit from it! Thank you for tuning in so far, and feel free to comment or respond in tweets with any questions.