With the Valve Index now out, Valve continue to make quick improvements to SteamVR with the latest Beta now available.

For SteamVR, they've changed how games are launched from SteamVR Home to avoid a possible hang, changes to hopefully avoid "error 308" on startup, automatic firmware recovery for the Valve Index and Vive Pro and a fix for a rare spontaneous shutdown of vrserver caused by very briefly connected pipes.

SteamVR Input had quite a few changes on this round, including new options for global rotation values and global deadzone value for thumbsticks. A new screen to test the input from any controller supported by SteamVR and more.

Lighthouse got a change to device discovery to reduce the impact of misbehaving USB drivers and devices and the Index Controllers got updated default input bindings for legacy applications that don't have specific configs set along with improvements for applications built for trackpads.

For those using VR kit on Linux, there's these fixes just for you:

Fixed Index HMD always notifying a firmware update is available.

Fixed being unable to re-start SteamVR after vrserver is killed/crashes ( aka LfMutexUnlockRobust crashes).

Fixed vrwebhelper crashing the Steam client.

Fixed 'psychedelic' colours in the Steam client caused by exiting SteamVR.

Fixed 'Restart SteamVR' prompts exiting SteamVR but not restarting it.

Various vrcompositor crash fixes.

Fixed 'ioctl(GFEATURE): Broken Pipe' spam in stdout

If you're using the Vive or Index on Linux, do let us know how you're getting on in the comments. Would certainly love to hear about it. Is it worth it?