Doesn't work anymore.
SteamVR 1.10.16,
Steam beta version 1582070848
I'm pretty sure this was working at some point back in September or October but it recently stopped working for me as well. On Arch with latest Nvidia drivers.
Interestingly I re-installed my system a few days ago (along with SteamVR) to a new SSD and only copied the necessary bits and pieces over from the old installation and, well, starting it with the system button works just fine now...
Well, to anyone who's having this problem and doesn't want to reinstall their OS, I've discovered I can get SteamVR to start when I press the system button by launching steam like so:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/.steam/steamapps/SteamVR/bin/linux64 steam
It seems like the vrstartup executable couldn't find libopenvr_api.so and libsteam_api.so. However, if I run it via the Steam Runtime (i.e. just as written above) I find that starting SteamVR often causes my whole system to hard crash! I don't get this issue if I run steam-native instead of steam though.
Ran steam-runtime --reset and the problem went away...
Nothing extracted yet.
System Information (please complete the following information):
Neither the button on the headset nor turning on the controllers starts SteamVR. There is no launch feedback or anything, it just doesn't do anything at all. It still worked only a few weeks ago.
Perhaps related to #138 in some way?
Note: Commenters who are also experiencing this issue are encouraged to include the "System Information" section in their replies.