Valve Uses Kubuntu For Demonstrating Linux VR With The HTC Vive

[Ropid]

If Valve likes KDE. Why don't they give support to Steam systray on KDE?
when one close steam, the application is minimized instead close to tray.

Create an environment variable "STEAM_FRAME_FORCE_CLOSE=1". Steam will then close its window instead of minimize, and you'll only have the tray icon left over.

[by.peroux]

Really nice stuff

And about the usage of KDE, I recall seing some valve stuff running on it a while back. Opengl debugger they showed at GDC or something.

So I assume some valve developper use kde for themselves and thus use it for demoing.

PS: found it in a GoL article here : https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articl...in-action.3330

[Alliancemd]

Might as well be "KDE neon".
It might be a developer preference and that to be a dev machine.

[xeekei]

Probably because a lot of Valve devs are also Windows devs, and Plasma gives them a familiar environment. Unity doesn't.

Also, why would they be using SteamOS? It's not even a desktop distribution.

[zboson]

I am so happy to see VR on Linux. It's awesome the Valve is doing this. I have more respect for them now. I wonder if there is some way for me to contribute to open VR. I am a competent C and C++ coder. I guess I could start here?

http://mesa3d.org/helpwanted.html

[rabcor]

Why aren't they using SteamOS?

[Jabberwocky]

Mainly because KDE is good?

I doubt it.

From a user's perspective it's mostly a matter of opinion. Some people prefer the way it looks, others like the bells and whistles. I prefer the user experience e.g. layouts and way I interact with it.

From a technical perspective it is complicated, there could be lots of reasons here. You will have to ask the team who did the demo to be sure. The twitter post has a Kubuntu tag but I don't think that account belongs to part of the Valve team, so I don't think it's very significant. He's probably just excited to see people use something he likes.

[Up123]

KDE is good, but I wouldn't interpret too much into it.

Probably just the engineer's prefered DE.

[Tuxee]

Christ! They are showing off a live demo of the HTC Vive on Linux and the whole discussions revolves around "Why did they use KDE? What is the grand scheme behind this?". This is obviously a developer rig and KDE the personal preference of the developer.

[ssokolow]

It would be great if they implemented left clicking on their icon, though. Not present in appindicator, but there's still a dbus signal, AFAIK.

Pretty happy to see them running KDE, however. It shows that Unity isn't the only one to get some love (as well as the GNOME-based SteamOS desktop).

The underlying D-Bus protocol actually only thinks in terms of "activate requested", "secondary activate requested", and "scroll requested". It's libappindicator which enforces that the primary action must be a menu... and then Unity binds primary to Left/Right click and secondary to middle-click.

That's why I always set my applications to use the legacy XEmbed-based tray icons directly under LXDE rather than just removing the appindicator host and letting them trust libappindicator's fallback. LXPanel's host widget doesn't have an option to bind secondary to left-click and primary to right-click to get the behaviour I'm used to.

KDE's KStatusNotifierIcon (and, I'd assume, the 3rd-party statusnotifier replacement for libappindicator which claims to be a GObject wrapper for the "KStatusNotifier D-Bus API") removes that restriction and lets applications like Amarok implement the classic "left-click toggles, right-click for context menu" behaviour when used with a host like Plasma which binds left/right to primary/secondary rather than either/center like Unity.

I am, however, worried about Plasma 5.2 dropping XEmbed. I haven't yet run into evidence that the KDE guys have implemented a "This is a libappindicator application. Swap the primary and secondary actions" column under System Tray Settings > Entries and I also haven't yet seen evidence that there's an XEmbed replacement patch ready for Mono-based applications like KeePass2.)