I thought this might be useful as more and more people have gotten their Frames (me included), and many more will be getting theirs.
Me and many others have run into some problems using their Frame, so a thread listing common problems and their solutions is a no-brainer.
Right eye ghosting
This is a known issue. It manifests as “ghosting” of bright parts of the image (menus and text usually) but only in the right eye view, and only when streaming wired or wireless. It persists regardless of streaming, framerate or projection settings. It affects not just the Frame, but other headsets like the Quests as well.
The fix is currently in the beta branch, update SteamVR on both your host system and the Frame to fix it.
Dongle not detected
The wifi chip in the dongle requires kernel 7.2 or newer. I was on the LTS kernel on my Endeavour OS install, so that was one part of the problem.
Valve has a troubleshooting script for linux users available, which for me revealed that my system had no regulatory region set.
On arch this is fixed by installing the wireless-regdb package, which provides region data. Then setting your region in /etc/conf.d/wireless-regdom by uncommenting your country.
After a reboot, the dongle shows up!
Dongle doesn’t pair
For some reason, pairing does not seem to work when attempting it from the streaming toggle button inside the Frame.
However, if I navigate to the “Remote Play” section in settings on my Frame, and do it from there, it works immediately.
Stream keeps freezing in single-link mode
Temporary solution is to just re-start the stream, but when it keeps happing, it’s because the Frame tries and fails to switch to multi-link.
To solve it, go to Remote Play in settings on the frame and disable the adaptor.
If you want to use multi-link, but it isn’t working, toggling the adaptor setting off and back on can fix the Frame failing to connect to it.
Streaming stutter
Edit: follow up post
My streams did not start off perfect. I’ve done many things to improve it, most of which are relevant to my particular router and hence not applicable to everyone.
But in general, it seems that for 6Ghz, 160Mhz channel width works better than 320Mhz. Also having ANY other device on the same connection can cause stutter. I also improved things by disabling some power saving features on the router side.
I’ve not messed with the dongle much, as I have a far more powerful router with much better coverage of my play space. Using it for the 6Ghz connection did not seem to work better than the router for me, but I’ve seen others get the best result by using ONLY the dongle, and disabling the LAN+WiFi stream entirely.
SteamVR desktop mirroring does not work
This seems to simply be broken on linux?
I’m using WayVR for this instead. You can add it to Steam so you can launch it from the Frame after starting a stream from your PC.
Other problems or solutions to bring up? Comment please!
Edit: added info on my recent discovery on how to fix stream freezes in single-link
For the desktop mirroring, if you are using Wayland, have you tried starting Steam with the -pipewire argument? Seems to be required for me for Steam to request the necessary permissions to capture the desktop for streaming.
It makes no difference. Does it work for you then?
I’m not sure about intentional desktop mirroring, I’ll have to look into that, but it does allow Steam to stream the desktop when games show a popup or launcher window instead of starting. I’m fairly sure that without that option all I got was an empty frame in the Frame.
There is a “desktop” option when streaming. If I try to open it, Steam crashes and everything breaks.
If I run steam with -pipewire-dmabuf and steamvr beta, I get desktop streaming by going “stream vr without a game” and then selecting desktop in the Frame taskbar.
Edit: looks like desktop streaming is fragile though, switching away from the desktop and back later in the same session resulted in an empty frame with no image again
No change.
My result is far more serius. It’s not just blank, opening the desktop entry fully and completely crashes everything.