Pimax says Pimax Play is coming to Linux, which would put its headsets on SteamOS

Pimax is building a Linux version of Pimax Play, the desktop software every one of its headsets needs before SteamVR will see it. “Pimax Play is coming to Linux as a dedicated client and it is being developed now,” the company said in an email to GamingOnLinux, which published the reply on October 12.

A Linux client is what stands between a Pimax headset and a SteamOS machine. Image: Valve Image: Valve

That is the whole of the commitment. No date, no version number, no beta channel and nothing to install, so a Pimax headset plugged into a Linux machine is in exactly the position it was in last week.

Windows-only software is what keeps Pimax off SteamOS

Pimax Play handles the firmware, the display modes and the SteamVR handshake, and it runs on Windows. That makes it the single reason a Pimax owner cannot move to SteamOS, and the reason the company’s headsets sat out the Steam Machine launch while Valve pushed SteamOS and SteamVR fixes to Steam Frame owners. Valve has spent the year making Linux the default surface for its own VR hardware, and a client is the price of entry for anyone else who wants to sell into it.

The missing piece is the vendor software, not the platform. SteamVR itself runs on Linux, where Valve has kept up a steady run of fixes, among them a beta that addressed grey colours on AMD hardware. What a Pimax headset lacks is the client that sets it up and hands it over.

Other projects have taken the long way round. An unofficial driver runs Xreal’s 1S glasses as a 3DoF SteamVR headset on a Steam Deck without any vendor software at all, which is the kind of work a first-party client would spare the next owner who tries.

The 60G AirLink kit stays an optional extra

The Crystal Pro’s wireless upgrade is not part of that. Pimax’s own product page describes the third-generation 60G AirLink kit as sold separately: a 2×2 MIMO link with two room antennas, up to 6 Gbps of throughput and under 2ms of added latency.

Pimax’s pitch for it is that the headset gets an uncompressed picture where the wearer is looking. The page says all wireless headsets compress the image, puts artefacts, banding and extra latency down to that, and claims the kit “sends the GPU’s native image straight to the panels in the area you’re looking at”. The company also calls it the first 2×2 MIMO 60GHz link on a VR headset, which is its own claim and not an independently measured one, and the page grants that 60GHz does not pass through walls.

None of that reaches a Linux desktop until the client does. Pimax has said it is being developed; the next thing worth reporting is a build with a number on it.

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