Life without windows

Hardware & Tech Questions
167

Once monado is started and the headset is connected you should be able to see some of the outputs, like if its tracking is working and if it sees its controllers.

You can also test the headset. While monado is running, open a shell and type
→ xrgears
which is a simple demo that shows you floating pictures and some moving gears in 3D, the background seems to be some German railway station.
If your picture is wildly flopping around or not moving at all, check your monado screen and enable the advanced UI. It has a window called “SLAM tracker #1”. Check the setting “submit data to SLAM Tracker” is ticked, and click “Reset tracker state”.

There are tons of other windows in monado as well. Check them out. I found a cool visualization for my hand controllers position and also for the mercury hand tracking that I installed. And lots of settings for the headset itself. Post them here if you find cool/useful stuff.

And if you know a lightweight OpenXR software to test the controllers, please tell me!

Sadly it seems like my Rift S controllers can only do 3dof, so that won’t help much. But the buttons are working.
I tried to activate mercury for the positional tracking, but it seems that not OpenXR but the openXR->SteamVR bridge is the problem here, so switching to another way of tracking the position doesn’t do much good.

Talking about SteamVR:
Envision also builds a monado-steamvr driver that can be registered with SteamVR to translate the OpenXR commands into SteamVR.

That happens by either copying the driver into a Steam directory, or by using a shell script to point at it. I first used the recommended way of using the script. (You have to have SteamVR installed of course).
For me it looks like this:
→ /home/aginor/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/vrpathreg.sh adddriver /home/aginor/.steam/bin64/steamvr-monado/

and you can remove it like this:
→ /home/aginor/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/vrpathreg.sh removedriver /home/aginor/.steam/bin64/steamvr-monado/

If you just run the script without a parameter it should tell you if you have an “external driver” installed.

Now, the problem for me was: If I do that, then the driver won’t run properly.
As I can see in the log it cannot find its dependencies. I tried adding them to that location manually, but that’s just too many files. One would have to adjust the LDPATH but that is something that Steam has to do it seems.

Steam’s logs are here:
/home/aginor/.steam/steam/logs/
The most interesting ones in this case are vrmonitor.txt and vrserver.txt

Some applications (including some on Steam) don’t need SteamVR though. Leave it off and try some. Those who have OpenXR support should work in some way or another.

Strangely some work, some don’t.
I managed to fly around in aircar just fine using my Oculus touch controllers and Rift S. Sadly there is some distortion so I get pretty nauseous, but it works out of the box.

Sometimes nothing works, escpecially if you played around with settings and drivers and plugging in and out a lot. Then closing everything including Steam and/or rebooting has done the trick once or twice. Not sure what I had done there.

I also tried Moss Book II, and while I got the headset running with (and weirdly without) the launch option -hmd=openhmd the fact that my controllers only do 3dof means that I cannot use them here.

I also tried Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, but it doesn’t recognize my VR headset at all.

Neither does DCSW sadly. I have no clue why. Any help would be appreciated, I run DCSW via Lutris and it works fine, but VR just does nothing.
I tried disabling the launcher and setting --force_enable_VR and --force_OpenXR but still no joy. Not even an error message, it just starts up as if I had not set it to VR. Not sure if the sandbox-ish nature of Lutris/proton/wine is causing that or anything.

So yeah, that’s it for now. I’ll try a few more games, but it seems like I have to wait for the monado guys and/or Valve to improve the RiftS driver and improve the SteamVR integration respectively.

EDIT: Oh, and I played around with variables in Envision and building my own profile, but after a whole day of testing it turned out that the one that works best is the default WMR setting, for some bizarre reason.

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168

According to budderpard over at Github, DCS VR does not work with Wine, only with Proton:

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169

I figured that it may be a lot cheaper to fund volunteers working on Monado to fix this, than to buy a new lighthouse-based headset with at least as many pixels as the Reverb.

I’ve found someone working on a better inside-out tracking driver, which should fix this, and donations could speed up integration into Monado. If anyone else is interested, DM me. The more people are willing to fund the same thing, the faster it’ll get fixed. And better inside-out headtracking for pcvr is essential for flight simmers!

170

That’s OK, I use Proton in Lutris. Here are my DCSW options :

Bildschirmfoto_2025-06-20_23-49-47
Bildschirmfoto_2025-06-20_23-49-47847×649 53.8 KB

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171

I just rechecked this (inadvertently because I forgot to reconfigure my soundcard after playing guitar). Either it is because I switched from native Wine to Proton or they fixed this bug but it works now out of the box with the pro-audio configured device. This makes my life a lot easier.

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172

Anybody using browser packages from AUR?

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173

Damn. I do occasionally. Thanks for posting, I had missed that apparently.

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174

Today I did some video grabbing.
I have an old (1990s) Sony Digital8 camera that seems to be working, and some tapes that we filmed back then. I think it can play back the Hi8 tapes from its (long dead I think) predecessor as well.

I didn’t trust it at first, so I put a tape in that was still in its sealed packaging, bought in 1998.

One of the batteries is also still working (or at least it could be charged and doesn’t immediately die) and I replaced the CR2025 coin battery for the clock and settings.

I filmed a short clip and played it back a few times. Works.
Side note: The “Super SteadyShot ™” stabilizer is a complete joke compared to my phone, and so is the video quality overall. But I admit that I feel some joy fiddling around with that old thing.

I then got me a cheap (20 bucks) video grabber and it works plug&play with Linux and OBS Studio.
I even found an s-video cable in my basement, which provides better image quality than the yellow BNC cable. (actually there is more noise in the picture, put it is sharper and the colors are better).

So yeah, I can probably now watch (and record onto my PC) the old Hi8 and Digital8 tapes. Thrilled! But I want to do more tests with the new tape.

Any hints for settings to maximize the (poor) video quality of the source? Recommended video format, filters or something? I played a bit around with the settings of VLC but not more.

And I noticed: VLC doesn’t install codecs automatically. Here are the packages that I installed, and now mpeg works:
vlc-plugin-ffmpeg
vlc-plugin-mpeg2

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175

Cool. I still have Digital8 cam (with a massive 800k pixel CCD) that I bought back in 1997 or 98? I might have to see if I can get it working, either that or find a reader for the tapes, because I know I have a heap of footage that I would like to save/convert.

I use WinX HD video convertor, I also picked up a free upgrade and installed Winxvideo AI as well. I don’t use that as often but it has a handy feature that allows you to enhance video and still images.

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176

I did some quick searching and I think I will try Shotcut first. I have worked with it some years ago and it seems to have grown a bit since, including filters such as visual noise reduction and so on, which Hi8 videos can definitely use.

Maybe I’ll find some time for that next weekend.

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177

Slightly OT, but I’m probably not the only one in this thread tired of Electron apps and their ridiculous resource consumption. Spotify has been particularly annoying lately because for some reason, the first time I start it after a reboot, whenever it’s playing it uses 100% of my GPU even if the GUI isn’t even on screen. When I close and reopen it, the GPU usage goes away, still, lackluster to say the least. I’m quite happy to say that at least in the case of spotify, I’ve found a brilliant replacement in the form of the TUI client ncspot. It’s reasonably fast (after having loaded), it uses less than 1/20th of RAM of the (in)official Linux client, doesn’t annoy you with recommendation slop and just does what it is supposed to.

Now if only there was a maintained TUI for slack.

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178

As they say in open source: Be the change you want to see in the world.

Unfortunately I barely use Slack since I’m forced to work on MicroShill Terms at the client.

I do enjoy lazygit and k9s A LOT though! Those tools combined may have done more for my workflow than neovim.

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179

Aren’t we scaring the newcomers like this? Should we have a separate terminal nerd topic and be welcoming here?

On-topic: Long live Linux Mint!!
My wife seems to have practically fully transitioned away from Windows, and styled her Linux Mint to look exactly like default Windows XP. It is glorious!

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180

Generally yes but in the case of slack,

a) It’s a paid product and I as a customer shouldn’t have to spend ridiculous amounts of my free time to produce a client that complies with basic QA criteria and

b) given that I’m now the only person on staff in a company of 4 people that is remotely experienced enough in doing so to write native production code, I really need to spend my free time either on keeping my aging body in a shape so it can tolerate sitting in front of a computer 8-10h a day without breaking down, or educating myself.

If there was a maintained TUI for slack, I’d be all over contributing to it, but the scope of maintaining such a project myself in my spare time is way beyond what I have in me right now.

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181

Yeah, we really shouldn’t be building replacements for official apps that fail basic house-training like “hogs 100% of the GPU even if the window is not visible”. That just sounds like it’s mining bitcoin in the background… sadly it probably isn’t and is just written incompetently and never tested prior to release :worried:

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182

Slightly off topic, but considering the number of Win10 PC still being used, 45% of Windows PCs as at three weeks ago, does anyone else think that MS are going to have to provide at least security updates for some time after the October ‘deadline’?

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183

IIRC they already pushed the deadline back.

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184

I am generally of the opinion that it doesn’t hurt to expose users of all levels to productivity-focused solutions now and again, even if they are niche. It’s a nice incentive to think about one’s own workflows and perhaps find ways to improve them. But if people find it annoying, by all means, keep this thread gaming focused.

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185

They will provide security updates, also to consumers. At least one more year.

But not for free, it‘s 30 bucks or 1000 MS Reward points.

The keyword is Extended Security Update (ESU).

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186

This was a great find :partying_face:, thank you.

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