Same issue here, debian 13.

Same here on nixos, also with ALVR.

Symlinking the lib32 folder into existence does not solve it, there's a typical "expected a 32bit lib" error.

Symlinking the lib32 folder into existence does not solve it, there's a typical "expected a 32bit lib" error.

Yeah, I was trying it too with the same effect as yours.

Getting the same error on Arch for driver vrlink with an Oculus Quest 2. The behavior is even worse in there - it loads into SteamVR but only for a few seconds before freezing.

Same issue here, CachyOS.

I'm having the exact same issue here, NixOS with Mesa 26.0.0 and a Quest 3. Is there an environment variable you could use to force it into 64 bit mode? Bc I checked and it's running the whole SteamVR process as 32 bit.

1.) steamvr.vrsettings uses the vrlink driver

~/.local/share/Steam/config/steamvr.vrsettings

"LastKnown" : {
      "ActualHMDDriver" : "vrlink",
      "HMDManufacturer" : "Oculus",
      "HMDModel" : "Oculus Quest3",
      "HMDSerialNumber" : "VRLINKHMDQUEST3"
   }

2.) The vrclient sets architecture to linux32, and can't find the associated vrlink driver

~/.local/share/Steam/logs/vrclient_steam.txt

Thu Feb 26 2026 02:01:11.011898 [Info] - steam 2.15.4 startup with PID=82164, config=/home/reelix/.local/share/Steam/config, runtime=/home/reelix/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR, arch=linux32
Thu Feb 26 2026 02:01:11.011963 [Info] - vrclient type=VRApplication_SteamWatchdog
Thu Feb 26 2026 02:01:11.011983 [Info] - Skipping HMD presence checks.
Thu Feb 26 2026 02:01:11.012830 [Info] - [Settings] Load Json Settings from /home/reelix/.local/share/Steam/config/steamvr.vrsettings
Thu Feb 26 2026 02:01:11.013001 [Info] - Watchdog namespace: 82164
Thu Feb 26 2026 02:01:11.013594 [Info] - [Settings] Load Json Settings from /home/reelix/.local/share/Steam/config/steamvr.vrsettings
Thu Feb 26 2026 02:01:11.031846 [Info] - Unable to load driver vrlink. Primary driver shared library not found on filesystem (for this architecture): /home/reelix/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/drivers/vrlink/bin/linux32/driver_vrlink.so.
Thu Feb 26 2026 02:01:11.031886 [Info] - Unable to init watchdog mode for driver vrlink: VRInitError_Init_FileNotFound
Thu Feb 26 2026 02:01:11.031897 [Info] - No drivers were capable of being watchdogs. Failing init.

3.) The associated driver is linux64

reelix@reelix-kubuntu:~$ ls -la /home/reelix/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/drivers/vrlink/bin/
total 12
drwxrwxr-x 3 reelix reelix 4096 Jan 12 21:08 .
drwxrwxr-x 4 reelix reelix 4096 Jan 12 21:08 ..
drwxrwxr-x 2 reelix reelix 4096 Feb 21 01:08 linux64

4.) The linux64 driver_vrlink.so exists, but isn't being searched for since arch=linux32

reelix@reelix-kubuntu:~$ ls -la /home/reelix/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/drivers/vrlink/bin/linux64/
total 3884
drwxrwxr-x 2 reelix reelix    4096 Feb 21 01:08 .
drwxrwxr-x 3 reelix reelix    4096 Jan 12 21:08 ..
-rwxrwxr-x 1 reelix reelix 3965288 Feb 21 01:08 driver_vrlink.so
reelix@reelix-kubuntu:~$ 

From what I can tell, steamvr can pick up other existing vr drivers (if you can find them and they're compatible), so that might be an option for people trying to get steamvr working right now. I haven't been able to verify that anyone has gotten it to work in Linux for a large period of time, so I'm starting to lean towards this being a thing that wasn't fixed bc they're focused on the new hardware. I do hope when it releases that they'll patch up the many bugs with VR and Linux.

I got farther with the arch=linux64 command, but it still didn't stream video

steamvr can pick up other existing vr drivers

@Mallowwww yeah - but where to look for them?

For now SteamVR works properly on 2 of my arch PCs but still I have the same issue on my laptop.

@Mallowwww yeah - but where to look for them?

Monado seems to be the leading one; I haven't gotten it working yet on my NixOS laptop but I'm making progress with it.

Monado seems to be the leading one

Ah, it is just avoiding SteamVR. It works for me this way but there are other problems with that. Some games are not compatible.

Ah ignore my last comment, sorry. My issue appears to be that the steam client was not starting SteamVR correctly. I am able to manually start SteamVR by doing:

cd ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$PWD/linux64/ ./vrmonitor.sh

Ah ignore my last comment, sorry. My issue appears to be that the steam client was not starting SteamVR correctly. I am able to manually start SteamVR by doing:

cd ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$PWD/linux64/ ./vrmonitor.sh

Sorry for the spam. I don't know why things suddenly broke ... Seems like an error on steam's end.

My final steps to get steam link running again for me were:

cd ~/.steam/root/
ln -s ./Steam/ubuntu12_* ./

For some reason it was looking for ~/.steam/root/ubuntu12_32 instead of ~/.steam/root/Steam/ubuntu12_32

And then to start SteamVR:

QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb $HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/vrmonitor.sh $HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper/_v2-entry-point --verb=waitforexitandrun -- $HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/vrstartup.sh

FWIW, if you are starting it from the command-line just for the moment, I believe you should be able to do it on pretty much every 64-bit Linux environment with just:

cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64
../vrenv.sh ./vrmonitor