Currently the two best-supported choices for VR on Linux are the original HTC Vive headset (the plain HTC Vive and also the Vive Pro v1 - but not the Pro v2) and the Valve Index. These both have native SteamVR support for Linux. That said, SteamVR has its bugs and not all of its features are available on Linux, but as long as you force the GPU to performance mode (so that it doesn't ever downclock and cause stutter) and can tolerate the SteamVR issues it's still a great experience. The main issues on Linux are that camera passthrough isn't implemented, and SteamVR doesn't manage lighthouses for you automatically (or at all). For the latter issue, while there's no real harm in letting them run 24/7, you can just unplug/turn power off manually, or write a script or find an Android app to put them to sleep and wake them up so they're not running all the time. Also be aware that Gnome doesn't yet support DRM leasing as required for VR to work on Wayland, so you need to use X server session. If you want to get the benefits of Wayland, KDE has DRM leasing and so SteamVR does run on it.

For other headsets, you might be able to have some success with open source alternative software.

For WMR there's the OpenHMD project which gives only seated play, no motion tracking. There's also Monado which uses OpenHMD, libsurvive etc to talk to the hardware. It's just the compositor; an alternative to SteamVR's compositor. Both OpenHMD and Monado have 3dof controller support but neither 6dof.

For Quest there's ALVR, which is like an open source version of airlink and reportedly somewhat buggy but usable. ALVR is a bit of a mess, honestly it feels like a miracle that it works at all. For some people it seems to never be able to run for various reasons. To get it to run there are loads of corner cases and issues you'll probably have to work through and weird buggy behavior from SteamVR. But if you get it to run and have a good enough encoder on your GPU, it's pretty much fine.

Longer term, Valve's next VR headset is at a very early stage. Code-named Deckard, these are the specs it's currently speculated to have:

• Qualcomm XR2-chip handling tracking and the VR-plumbing side of things
• AMD APU handling the graphics
• 2x eMagin 4k MicroOLED displays in a diamond-configuration for wider FOV capable of foveated rendering
• Arcturus Inside-out tracking
• Eye-tracking
• Off-ear/"floating" headphones/speakers. built-in Stereo-mic. Like the Index
• Most likely some kind of option to hook it up to a pc, either wired or wireless
• Linux-based SteamOS like the Deck's running on the headset

The XR2-chip is a specialized Qualcomm ARM-chip that excels at VR-stuff like processing tracking cameras, positioning and that sort of jazz. The AMD APU would run SteamOS and steam since steam is an x86-program.