I bought a pair of XREAL Air glasses in mid-2023 and was disappointed to find that none of my devices supported them. My Steam Deck was the only device that would even display anything on the glasses, but it couldn't take advantage of any of the head-tracking or AR capabilities of the glasses. XREAL themselves have taken a sort of hardware-first approach, to the detriment of all their software offerings, and Linux/Steam Deck doesn't even seem to be on their radar.

I immediately started tinkering with some of the open source projects that the developer community has put together, and realized it would be possible to build some of the functionality that the XREAL and Steam Deck communities desperately want. In September I announced that my Decky plugin was live, making the installation and configuration of my Linux gaming driver trivial. The XREAL community ate this up and I knew I couldn't stop there.

I quickly started researching what would be needed for my next project that I call Breezy Desktop, which is an attempt at building a virtual workspace (productivity) application for AR glasses on Linux. I tinkered with various options and found that a Vulkan shader integration would be a pretty simple initial approach that could get me a quick win on Steam Deck. I previewed that to the XREAL community and they went crazy for it, so I devoted 4 full-time weeks to the effort and eventually announced it to much fanfare; the response has been amazing.

Since then I've continued to add features and match what the XREAL Beam device offers, including Smooth Follow, Sideview, and SBS support. I also reached out to other XR device manufacturers. VITURE enthusiastically supported my effort and put out a Linux SDK that I incorporated. RayNeo is now integrated as well, and Rokid has provided an SDK.

I released the GNOME implementation of Breezy Desktop for productivity in June 2024 and my next steps are to add widescreen and multi-screen support, as well as expand out to ARM hardware and various GNOME versions, and work on supporting nested or DistroBox style options for non-GNOME desktop environments. Then port to KWin Effects for KDE desktops.

A lot more is still in store for this project:

• Improved GNOME support for ARM and older GNOME versions
• Increased device support (Rokid, etc...).
• Virtual display for all of Game Mode, not just Vulkan games.
• KWin Effects for KDE (steam deck desktop mode)
• 6DoF support (e.g. for devices like XREAL Light and Ultra).
• Monado support.

If you've found my work useful, or it's saved you from another device purchase, or you're looking forward to any of my future roadmap, your support here will help greatly.

If you want to stay on top of all the latest development, you can follow me on Reddit, Ko-fi, Github, or join the LinuXR Discord server where I post more regular updates.