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Hi! A few months ago, I was trying to get steam link vr working on my pc, and it was very... uncooperative, I spent ages trying to find a solution only to finally find it on some obscure forum post. So here's how it went:

Upon trying to connect to my pc, I kept getting:

Video Encoder Error  
Couldn't set up a video encoder. Your GPU may not be supported, or you may need to update your computer's graphics driver. (499)  

Preventing me from connecting. Simply putting this in my launch args for SteamVR fixed that for me, RADV_PERFTEST=video_decode,video_encode DRI_PRIME=1 ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/vrmonitor.sh %command%.

But then I got a different error (I think 1033 or 1202? idk). After looking it up, I found that I just needed to swap my mesa drivers to the freeworld variety, as it turns out that fedora's defualt mesa driver's don't come with hardware encoding support, but freeworld does. You can do so by running sudo dnf swap mesa-vulkan-drivers mesa-vulkan-drivers-freeworld. From there, it worked! The vr dashboard was broken at first, appearing completely invisible, but I think I fixed it by just rebooting.

ik it's short and sweet, but I'm hoping this can help someone somewhere, since it took me so long to find it myself.

PS: The only thing is, steamvr currently can't display your desktop properly if you're using wayland, it simply doesn't support it. BUT here's a cool project that can help you work around it, for some reason there's currently a bug with their pipewire implementation (or something like that) such that you have to manually connect the display streams in the coppwr pipewire gui (helvum and carla don't work), otherwise it'll only show one frame of the display stream.

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[-] Hazzard@lemmy.zip 7 points 2 weeks ago

Man, Steam's mostly broken Wayland support is such a bummer, far and away my biggest disappointment with my Linux gaming PC. Really hoping they get it together for the Steam Machine, Wayland's features would obviously be very useful for that experience, but I haven't seen it on the beta yet...

Still planning to get a Steam Frame though, so your wisdom may be very much appreciated then. Thanks for pointing me to WayVR, it sounds like that may make a big difference!

I know! I'm really hoping that with the release of the steam frame, they'll also update steamvr to have wayland support (maybe even the steam client itself?) and to actually support amd gpu's OOTB without any tinkering

By the way! For anyone interested, here's the forum post where I posted my original solution. And I think here is where I actually found the fix, idk though

this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
83 points (100.0% liked)

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