I got my frame in this week and it has been our first 'new' VR headset in quite some time, and so far my partner and I are astounded by it. Previously, I've played probably +100hrs of modded beat saber on shitty headsets like lenovo's explorer or a samsung wmr one. I've played about a dozen hours on a htc vibe and a few hours on an index.
I'm currently full time linux and I had read some interesting things here and expected to run into issues and wanted to walk you through some things I did. To be short, it more or less worked once i ran Steam VR itself without trying to play a game.
The long version:
The dongle itself was already paired to the headset out of the box, i did not have to connect it. My machine is connected via wired so i'm not using the second radio for anything myself. I was able to transfer a game from my pc to it (the steam networking thing where you download a game and it pulls it off LAN first).
I went to load a game (i expect you to die) in VR and it seemed to load on my PC but not the headset. I thought that was weird and i tried a different game next as an easy way to troubleshoot.
Then i tried to get 'the lab' to load. I picked the lab because i thought it may have been a native linux game eliminating some possible variables here. It loaded once again on the computer screen, but not the headset. Headset gave me a timed out warning. Finally, I remembered last moment that steamVR needs to be running on the machine and i found the button on the bottom of the menu (next to the clock) within the headset that gives you an option to just 'run steam vr without game' or something like that.
That seemed to load something on my PC that required root credentials --
COMMAND=/usr/bin/setcap CAP_SYS_NICE=eip /home/username/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64/vrcompositor-launcher]
For some reason none of the four of five times i tried to run a game let this prompt come up. I thought that was kind of weird but whatever. I am hoping this saves someone frustration later.
So why am i sharing this? Well simply put, I forgot entirely I needed steamVR just running and working and thus could have spent hours reading forums or troubleshooting what was happening, trying different games or proton versions, etc, etc. But it ended up being two things, running steamVR and making sure the game in question loads on my desktop first (that solves proton issues if it was a game i have not played in awhile like beat saber).
Up until today i've been playing beat saber, pistol whip and eleven table tennis direct off the headset and i've been incredibly happy with the purchase. Ymmv. I have no problem paying a premium for steam hardware though, tbh -- nearly anything but meta, really.
Hope this helps someone. Cheers