ALVR can't launch SteamVR - steam.desktop is not executable

Help
1

I’m trying to play SteamVR games on my Oculus Quest 2 using ALVR. I’ve got ALVR and Steam enabled in my configuration.nix:

programs.alvr.enable = true;
programs.alvr.openFirewall = true;

programs.steam.enable = true;

I can launch ALVR fine, and SteamVR launches fine through the Steam launcher. However, ALVR has to launch SteamVR itself in order to function properly. When it tries to do so, I get this error:

image

steam.desktop isn’t executable, and (unsurprisingly) the KIO client can’t make it executable.

How can I fix this?

2 Likes
2

It’s not supposed to be an executable either, .desktop files are just text files with metadata.

I’ve not used ALVR before. Do you select the file to execute in a menu somewhere? If so, read that .desktop file and give it the path (and arguments) the .desktop executes instead.

3

ALVR wants to open SteamVR…

image
image1873×1392 142 KB

When you press the button, this happens:

image
image1093×606 48.1 KB

When you try to “Continue” you get the above error message:

Unable to make the service Steam executable, aborting execution.

Existing file /home/omega/.local/share/applications/steam.desktop is not writable.
4

But you still can run SteamVR manually in Steam!

5

ALVR can’t connect to SteamVR if it is launched through steam. I’m not sure what’s different about the two methods, but that’s how it’s done.

6

Ah, I always wondered how this is working. When I had ALVR running and manually ran SteamVR, then SteamVR kind of detected my Oculus Quest, but I couldn’t run any VR app and nothing showed up on the Oculus Quest… :thinking:

7

Did you figured it out? I’m having the same problem

8

I decided to dig around the code a little bit since ALVR is open-source:

pub fn start_steamvr() {
    Command::new("steam")
        .args(["steam://rungameid/250820"])
        .spawn()
        .ok();
}

This is deceptively simple, and I feel like this isn’t actually what’s happening when I push the button since we see the window popup from KIO client (as in pbek’s reply), which implies maybe XDG or something else is just being prompted to load a steam:// url without specifying an executable to load it it, then KIO picks it up and understands that the “Steam” program has to handle it. I’m not totally sure how a program would deliberately open a steam url with KIO like that, so I wouldn’t know what code to look for to confirm or deny that this is happening with ALVR.

I’m going to experiment with this behavior by creating a rust program that runs the exact code of the start_steamvr function and see if KIO handles it or if it just runs it without any bells and whistles. If the former occurs, then there might be a workaround in putting the steam executable in a place outside of the Nix store.

9

I can confirm that, in isolation, the start_steamvr() function above does not engage KIO like ALVR does, which means that either there’s something else going on to change the context in which start_steamvr() is run such that KIO gets used, or different code is being run when the Launch SteamVR button is pushed.

10

Absolutely the same problem with Anytype (from nixpkgs).

When clicking a link it first shows warning

image

And then the same error:

image
image939×152 18.8 KB

NixOS 24.05
Plasma 6.0.5
Anytype 0.40.8

UPD. The story has been going on for more than 2 years already:

UPD2. I got it fixed by this:

xdg.portal = {
    enable = true;
    xdgOpenUsePortal = true;
};
1 Like