so I was able to get past installation by adding /user/sbin to PATH before starting steam, however the issue will continue to appear in subsequent runs without it present in PATH. I at least have a workaround, but I will leave this ticket because the underlying problem still exists

It's worth noting that your PATH will depend on how you're launching Steam. I'm on a linux distro and was using an Xfce launcher that was added to my launcher panel, and that has a different PATH than bash (which already included /user/sbin. Launching Steam through bash resolves the issue for me.

I'm getting the same issue on fedora 37 and so far niether of the above workarounds have fixed the issue, I have getcap installed and it's in the path when I launch steam. When I attempt to launch steamVR all I get is

I attempted to force start steam vr by calling ./vrstartup.sh and multiple windows opened but none of my base stations could detect the headset or controllers during room setup.

I have encountered same issue. My workaround is following:

ln -s /usr/sbin/getcap /usr/bin/getcap
ln -s /usr/sbin/setcap /usr/bin/setcap

You must restart your SteamVR instance, so it will ask elevation and you would need type your password to something like pkexec.

@KisaragiEffective Thank you! This is the pointer I was looking for.

For anyone else on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed do the following:

sudo zypper install libcap-progs rustup
sudo ln -s /usr/sbin/getcap /usr/bin/getcap
sudo ln -s /usr/sbin/setcap /usr/bin/setcap

# alternatively you can set the cap yourself without having to symlink it. I would recommend still doing the symlink just in case you have to change SteamVR versions if you are a ALVR user like me on Linux.

sudo setcap CAP_SYS_NICE=eip .local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64/vrcompositor-launcher

Output should look similar to the following:

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/vrsetup.sh 
vrsetup.sh[6481]: exec /home/linux/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/vrenv.sh /home/linux/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/vrsetup.sh
vrenv.sh[6481]: VRCOMPOSITOR_LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/linux:/home/linux/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64/qt/lib:/home/linux/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64
vrenv.sh[6481]: exec /home/linux/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/vrsetup.sh
vrsetup.sh[6481]: Relaunching under scout LDLP runtime.
vrsetup.sh[6481]: exec /home/linux/.steam/bin/steam-runtime/run.sh /home/linux/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/vrsetup.sh
vrsetup.sh[6481]: Detected scout LDLP runtime.
vrsetup.sh[6481]: /home/linux/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64/vrcompositor-launcher binary has cap_sys_nice privileges

Bug still exists in Debian Trixie as of July 2024, but can be worked around with the provided terminal commands from @KisaragiEffective

ln -s /usr/sbin/getcap /usr/bin/getcap
ln -s /usr/sbin/setcap /usr/bin/setcap

its sad to see they still havnt fixed steamvr

it seems like they are focusing steam vr on ubuntu even though their steam deck doesnt even run on a ubuntu/debian distro it runs on arch like how my distro is arch based

Strange this works for me on ubuntu 24.04 but not on Fedora 41 Gnome X11

I came here with the same issue. Based on the suggestion of running steam from bash I decided to try just calling $steam. To my surprise, it's a built-in [Kubuntu 25.04]. I was using the flatpak installation. I reinstalled Steam through bash (just called $steam) and uninstalled the flatpak and now steamVR is working out of the box.