SteamVR beta 2.18.2 turned Linux VR streaming green or black, and the fix is also 2.18.2
SteamVR beta 2.18.2 turned the headset image solid green or solid black for Linux users streaming to a Quest or a Steam Frame, within an hour of its release at 18:22 UTC on October 1. Valve shipped a hotfix at 23:00 UTC the same evening and left the build number at 2.18.2, so the version string in SteamVR tells you nothing about whether you have the fix.
Steam Frame owners streaming from Linux hit the same fault as Quest owners on Steam Link. Image: Valve
Owners posting in Valve's own SteamVR bug report forum describe the same failure on Steam Link and on Steam Frame: head tracking, controllers and positional audio keep working, the preview window on the PC shows a correctly rendered frame, and the headset shows one flat colour. "After updating to beta 2.18.2 I launch Steam Link on the headset and connect to the PC the displays go green," the owner who opened the thread wrote, adding that rolling back to the release branch restored the picture and returning to the beta brought the green back.
Valve folded the fix into the build that broke it
Valve's patch note for 2.18.2 records the repair in Valve's own words: "(11:00 PM UTC time) Hotfix to resolve green/black screen issues with SteamLink on Linux." The post carries a timestamp of 18:22 UTC, so that line reached owners more than four hours after the update it describes.
An account carrying the forum's developer badge on Valve's SteamVR hub first told the owners posting there "we know what the issue is and will be fixing it shortly", then returned with "Fix is live, still under version 2.18.2" and told them to force the update by verifying the integrity of SteamVR's installed files from its properties in Steam. That verification is the only way to tell the fixed 2.18.2 from the broken one.
Both AMD and Nvidia machines lost the picture
The reports span Linux distributions from Nobara and Arch to Gentoo and Kubuntu, on Radeon and GeForce cards alike, and a second thread about Steam Frame streaming includes a Steam Machine running SteamOS 3.9. Some owners saw green and some saw black, with no pattern by graphics vendor.
A report filed on Valve's Linux tracker at 20:36 UTC on October 1 gives the before and after on one machine, an RTX 4070 SUPER under CachyOS: the same PC streamed to a Steam Frame correctly on 2.18.1 on September 30, and showed solid green on 2.18.2 on October 1. It attaches four crash dumps, three of them from the SteamVR compositor, and is still open.
Only the beta branch is involved. The previous beta, 2.18.1, went out on September 23 and is the build that cleared up right-eye ghosting for most of the owners who had reported it, and the stable branch never carried 2.18.2 at all.
The tracker report is open with no diagnosis
Neither the patch note nor the forum replies name an encoder, a driver branch or a graphics stack, and no Valve diagnosis has been attached to the open tracker report. Anyone hunting a cause should keep this apart from the other recent Linux streaming fault on the record: the 580 driver branch Valve confirmed breaks Steam Link VR on Linux is specific to Nvidia, and this regression took out Radeon machines too.
There is no 2.18.3. When Valve's SteamVR news feed was checked at 12:10 UTC on October 2, 2.18.2 was still the newest beta, which leaves the fix for a public regression sitting inside the build number that caused it.
