tobias_platen's blog
Tobias Alexandra Platen's software freedom blog
Day against DRM – why I won’t buy any Steam Hardware in 2026
July 17th, 2026
It is well known that Valve distributes nonfree computer games with Digital Restrictions Management, so I decided that I will not buy the new Steam Machine or the Steam Frame in 2026. (I still have a Valve Index that works with libsurvive). Freedom Respecting gaming hardware (except GameCube with a modchip) is much more expensive than the Steam Machine. This shows that the issue is not price, at least one a direct way. Freedom comes with a price tag that has gone up (MUDflation). There are effects of economics of scale (that Richard Stallman calls “copying books in 1950”) that make both software and hardware more expensive.
For hardware a high price is a natural monopoly, for software the monopoly is artificial and unethical. If more people care about freedom and stop buying games and hardware with DRM, the prices for freedom respecting gaming hardware will go down. I am willing to pay for games, but only if the games respect my freedom.
So if you care about freedom, you can donate to your favourite libre games developer instead of buying DRMed games from Valve. Soon I will open my own webshop where I will be selling hardware that I have designed or hacked. I will accept GNU Taler for both payments and age verification. Unlike other solutions GNU Taler is fully freedom respecting. I as a seller will only know that a person is older than the games rating, but I do not need to knew their legal names and age. That principle is called Zero-Knowledge.
Instead of buying the Steam Frame I will build my own VR headset. I will invest high amounts of money in protoyping. The components that I pick should work with free software as much possible. Some components do not exist today, or come with a high price tag if freedom respecting. If the Steam Frame becomes cheaper after many years, I might want to start a reverse engineering project. Without the help of Charles Lohr I would be unable to use my Valve Index in freedom. For the Steam Frame I want to make sure that it complies with the GNU GPL at minimum.
The Steam Machine is also too expensive for me and does not fit into my use case. Many games included in the GNU Guix System can run on an old cheap ThinkPad X200 or a hacked GameCube. As I prefer libre homebrew games, I will not spend much money on Steam Games and Steam Hardware. Besides non-free software from Valve there is also the AMD Platform Security Processor that implements DRM needed to run Windows 11. Valve recently published Windows drivers for the Steam Machine. I do not use Windows and I also avoid Proton for non-free games such as VRChat.
VRChat Enshittification
December 31st, 2025
A year ago I once played a few hours VRChat. When I tried to play VRChat again, the game did not launch. I decided to do a clean install of Debian 13, Steam and VRChat so that I can play VRChat again. In one year there were many changes in VRChat including in-game purchases. Most avatars that users can select, now come with a price tag. Importing avatars in VRM format is still possible, but not easy and developer tools are needed to do so. You also need to install Blender and Unity. While Blender is free software, Unity is not. VRChat is also known to use anti-chat software. While VRChat is compatible with Valve’s Proton, it does not run natively on GNU/Linux and will never run on the Talos II.
The version for Meta Quest is even worse. I expect that Android and iOS versions are as bad as the Meta Quest version. Since I do not own any Apple hardware and plan to replace Android with GNU/Linux, I will never install any of the mobile versions. Since V-Sekai and Overte are free software, I will be able to replace VRChat on both mobile devices and desktop, including the mobile VR usecase.
V-Sekai has to potential to replace VRChat, but currently is a very incomplete alpha version. It can run on Windows, GNU/Linux and even Android including on the POWER9 CPU that the Talos II uses. At the moment V-Sekai is not usable with a VR-Headset, such as my Valve Index. A port for Meta Quest does not exist, but is theoretically possible. Many components of V-Sekai can be added to games that use the Godot Oculus Quest Toolkit, such as Godot Beep Saber VR.
There is also a project called Overte, maintainted by Overte e.V. which can run natively on GNU/Linux. Overte is based on a VR platform by High Fidelity and shares some code with Vircadia. Overte is currently the best free replacement for VRChat. I recently began packaging Overte for GNU Guix, a purely functional package manager for the GNU system. Overte has good documentation and can be built from source on Debian and Ubuntu.
Steam Frame, Gaming and VR devroom at FOSDEM and a new FPGA devboard
November 13th, 2025
Yesterday Valve announced the Steam Frame (and some more devices). Before that there have been leaks about a project called the Valve Deckard. Like the Meta Quest the Steam Frame uses a Qualcomm ARM SoC. It does not run Android and comes with a GNU/Linux disto called SteamOS. My current VR headset is a Valve Index, which works well with free software maintained by Collabora. While the Valve Index is now discontinued, I guess that one can still buy replacement parts from iFixit. There are still new lighthouse products from Bitcraze AB, including an upcoming RP2040 based version of the Lighthouse Deck. The TS4231 (an infrared receiver IC for SteamVR) is also used by PiMax and other companies that make VR gear. I even made my own breakout board for the TS4231 after I heard an interesting talk at FOSDEM 2025.
So at FOSDEM 2026 I plan to do a talk in the Gaming and VR devroom about my work on Godot based VR games. While I am currently adding support for full-body tracking to Godot Beep Saber VR (using SlimeVR trackers for example) I am looking for a Fully Freedom-Respecting VR Headset. As none exists I started building my own prototypes. For the HMD I will use the Persephone 2, a DiY SteamVR Headset but with Lighthouse tracking added. I still use the Valve Knuckles Controller with libsurvive, but it is also possible to build your own VR controllers. I am also going to build my own devboard with the RP2040 and the Lattice iCE40HX8K-CB132 FPGA (the same FPGA model that other SteamVR devices use). For a possible wireless controller/tracker I will use the same chips that Valve, Bitcraze and SlimeVR Butterfly Trackers use.
While by first FPGA board will be iCE40 based I am already planning for an upgrade to the ECP5 used by the OrangeCrab. This FPGA is ideal for development of more complex hardware such as a GPU or a BMC. It is also used in the Arctic Tern and the much cheaper ULX3S. Or even a fork of the OrangeCrab with two FPGAs: either one ECP5 and one iCE40, or possibly two ECP5 FPGAs connected via SerDes. For some use cases this could be cheaper than an Artic Tern with both slots populated. But I think the Arctic Tern is worth its money. But first I will wait for the Solid Silicon X1 and the Antarctic Tern. If there is no new ECP5 board in the end of 2026 that fits my use case I might make one. But first I will make a clone of the Shoto Core Module but designed to work with libsurvive instead of SteamVR. On the long term a Fully Freedom-Respecting GPU ASIC is needed, like the Talos II and Steam Frame this could also include a Gen 4 PCIe interface. I will continue using my Valve Index with my Talos II for many years and I am not willing to spend money on the Steam Frame or the Steam Machine. But I am still waiting for Valve to publish detailed technical specs, including any possible FPGA used in the Steam Frame before I make my own FPGA powered VR headset.
Building my own Libsurvive compatible Lighthouse tracker
April 1st, 2025
I am using both a Valve Index and a Crazyflie with Libsurvive, with my Talos II, a mainboard FSF-certified to Respect My Freedom. Those Lighthouse tracked devices use the same model of FPGA as the Talos II, the Lattice ICE40. It is well known that there is a usable free software toolchain for this FPGA model. Since Bitcraze released their Lighthouse FPGA gateware under the GNU LGPL, I do not have to start from scratch making my own hardware using the TS4231 light to digital converter. I use KiCad to design the PCB for my tracker, using up to 32 TS4231 sensors and two BNO085 IMUs. Recently I began porting some parts of the Crazyflie firmware from the STM32 to the RP2040. Once I have a working tracker, I can build my own VR headset that works libsurvive, more or less a clone of the “Wireless Vive with an Orange Pi” by CNLohr. This is not an April Fool’s RFC’s, it is known to work on the RK3399.
The weekend after I ♥ Free Software Day 2025 – Sunday
February 16th, 2025
This is part II of the I Love Free Software Day blogpost. More specifially it is about the game Veloren which I played once three years ago, when the pandemic was still ongoing. My computer that I had at time did not have a good GPU, so I used my brothers old computer with an NVIDIA card. A few years I got into VR which is only possible in freedom thanks to the libsurvive project. To be able to play VR games I baught an AMD graphics card, before that I used my Talos II’s built-in ASpeed graphics. With the new GPU I can drive up to 4 monitors. All the games that I run on my Talos II are free software:
VRChat is popular in the Transgender 🏳️⚧️ community, but I avoid it since it is non-free. V-Sekai is one of the free software replacements. While we need binaries to run a program on a computer, we also need source code for a program to qualify as free software. I am using part of the V-Sekai code in my BeatSaber clone called BeepSaber as I want full body tracking controlling an animated VRM avatar. While I usually present masculine as an enby 🖤💜🤍💛 (I never wear a beard), my VRM avatar will be female ♀️. For me that is a way to try out genders different from my gender assigned at birth.
There is another free software VR game that I would like to play. It is called VoxelWorksQuest and its author is the same person that wrote BeepSaber. Unfortunately it is unmaintained, so I decided to replace it with with a VR port of minetest (now called luanti). Minetest is similar to Minecraft and Veloren, but it is both free software and able to run on old computers with built-in freedom respecting GPUs. Luanti is also written in a programming language called lua, which I use at work a lot. In the next few weeks I will be continuing to work on Minetest XR adding missing important features to make the game playable.
Next month I will go to the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage where I also expect to meet many queers 🏳️🌈. There is also a “Gaming Night” 🎮 and many interesting talks, including one about KiCad (the tool that I use for building my own hardware), BTRFS (my preferred filesystem), Banking apps (unfortunately not GNU Taler) and Passkeys (allowing passwordless login). In the meantime I will watch recorded videos from FOSDEM, starting with “Declarative and Minimalistic Computing” then moving to “Open Hardware and CAD/CAM”.
The weekend after I ♥ Free Software Day 2025 – Saturday
February 15th, 2025
Yesterday I contributed to the Free Software Directory, unfortunately I did not have enough time to write my intended blog post. So I am doing that now. #ilovefs
Free Software is a matter of freedom, not price. A program is free software if the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:
🖤 The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
💜 The freedom to study how the program works and to make changes (freedom 1).
🤍 The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
💛 The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3).
I have been developing free software both professionally and as a hobby for long times. Recently I came out as genderqueer (also known as non-binary) at the first
meeting of a GNU/Linux user group I cofounded. On the weekend before I was at FOSDEM where I met many trans and non-binary individuals, some of them at the Guix Days fringe event.
I also have used software written by trans and non-binary contributors. This includes the FPGA toolchain based on yosys and nextpnr, GNU MediaGoblin, SlimeVR and Monado to just name a few. For an upcoming hardware project (A Lighthouse tracked VR headset with RYF in mind), I will be using an ICE40 FPGA. For GNU MediaGoblin, I plan to setup my own instance again. I spefifically backed SlimeVR because the software is portable and can be used on a Freedom RespectingTalos II. When I saw the BLÅHAJ in the SlimeVR video I immediately recognized it is part of the Transgender culture. I also saw more than one BLÅHAJ at FOSDEM. Finally there is Monado, where one of the lead developers and some other contributors do identify as non-binary and/or transgender. Many of those persons were not out when I started using the software. Over the time, I realized that I am trans too, more specifically non-binary.
Part II of the blog post will be done tomorrow.
Back from FOSDEM
February 3rd, 2025
This weekend I visited FOSDEM and the Guix Days in Brussels. On Thursday I went to the Guix Days, a FOSDEM Fringe event. There I met many GNU Guix and Spritely Goblins contributors. I have been using the Guix System for many years, and I have plans to run Guix on smartphones. Spritely Goblins looks as interesting as GNUnet and Taler for me, but I did hot have a deeper look yet. From my eduction in computer science, I know both distributed systems and actor models. Goblins can be used with both Guile and Racket. I prefere the Guile variant, since I already know Guile from Guix. We discussed why “guix pull” is so slow. I also had proposed a talk about Guix System on Alternative target architectures (ARM, RISCV, POWER etc.) including smartphones and my Talos II workstation, currently running Debian GNU/Linux. My second proposal was about Virtual Reality. Unfortunately both poposals have been rejected as there were too many good talks.
On Saturday, the first Day of FOSDEM, I was in the Android Open Source Project and FOSS on Mobile Devices devrooms. There were many interesting talks including “Forking Android considered harmful” and “Towards a purely open AOSP: Adding Android-like functionality to AOSP”. On the second half of the day I went to the “FOSS on Mobile Devices” devroom, where I met Caleb Connolly who works on Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Mainline Linux. I also met them at the last FrOSCon where I presented my port of Minetest to the LibreM5, a smartphone running GNU/Linux. The first talk in the FOSS on Mobile Devices devroom was “Mainline vs libhybris: Technicalities, down to the buffer”, I also watched most others. I have used libhybris once, as part of Droidian running on my OnePlus 6T, a SDM845 phone. Due to bugs I switched back to Android, later I found out that my phone was not supported by Droidian anymore. By contrast, Mobian uses the Mainline Kernel and does not use Android drivers.
On Sunday I started in the JavaScript devroom, then moved to the “Declarative & Minimalistic Computing” devroom, where I met many of the those who I saw at Guix Days, on the days before FOSDEM. First I listened to the “Minimalist web application deployment with Scheme” talk, then I ate my second a vegan burger at FOSDEM(the first one one was at Saturday). Unfortunately most of the food offered at FOSDEM is still not vegan. Next I went to the Luanti and FOSS on Mobile Devices booths in the K building and talked with the developers about some of the projects that I am currently working on. After that I went back from where I came from to listen to the “The Whippet Embeddable Garbage Collection Library” talk before the most interesting talks about the GNU Shepherd and Spritely Goblins started. Unfortunately I missed the talks from Jessica Tallon and Christine Lemmer-Webber, as I went to the Robotics and Simulation devroom where I had two interesting talks about the “Open 3D Engine” and the “Valve’s Lighthouse 2.0 Technology”. While I prefer Godot for VR, I still liked both talks. I am also working on my VR headset using the “Lighthouse positioning deck” from Bitcraze and a postmarketOS compatible smartphone, currently running both Android and Mobian.
After those two talks I went to the Keynotes at Janson (the big room). Both “The Growing Body of Proprietary Infrastructure for FOSS Development: Repeating Bad History” and “How we are defending Software Freedom against Apple at the EU’s highest court” were pretty interesting talks from Free Software activists who I fully support. Finally I went to room near Jansen where people were working on Virtual Reality (VR). I did not know about Overte e.V. and their Social VR projects yet. I told one of the developers that I use components of V-Sekai in my BeatSaber clone. V-Sekai is more or less a clone of the non-free VRChat game, one of those games that are popular in the transgender community. I am nonbinary and trans myself, and met many other queers at both FOSDEM and Guix Days. Not fully out yet, I enjoy social VR where I can try out a feminine avatar, while presenting mostly masculine in real life. At FOSDEM I wore a skirt and a dress, makeup and cat ears. Next month I’ll plan to go to the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage conference.
Meta Horizon OS, Replicant and the GPL
April 23rd, 2024
Meta Horizon OS is a variant of Android, which includes GPLed parts, including the kernel Linux. Replicant is a fully free variant of Android that can run on smartphones and other kinds of devices. As the maintainer of libsurvive I have been working on a port to Android/Replicant which is known to work well with the Rockchip RK3399.
A few weeks ago, I asked for the source code for the Oclulus-Linux kernel, but until now the Meta Quest does not comply with the GPL. So I plan to make my own device running Replicant and maybe Guix codenamed the Replica Quest. The Replica Quest will include a user interface called LibreVR Mobile and on my POWER9 system I use LibreVR Desktop. Any part that Meta releases as free software can be integrated into Replicant. Non-free parts need to be replaced, that will be hard work.
Talking more about Freedom not Less
February 14th, 2024
I don’t like the term “Open Source”, because it does not refer to freedom. When a computer program is labeled as “Free” (or “Free to Play” in the case of games) we have
the same problem that “Free” often means a price of zero. By contrast games such “Tanks of Freedom” and “Freedom Saber” really respect users freedom. So I try to avoid using free
as an adjective, and use the term “Freedom” instead: Instead of saying that something is “Free Software”, I say it respects the users freedom.
I Love Free Software Day 2024
February 14th, 2024
I recently did my first FOSDEM talk, about a Free Software project that I contribute to: Using the ECP5 for Libre-SOC prototyping. On the day before I met some of the GNU Guix developers. With this short blogpost I want to say a simple “Thank you” to those people I met at FOSDEM, and those who have started projects such as Libre-SOC, SlimeVR, CrazyFlie and Godot Engine.
Because I Love Free Software, I’ll started my own Free Software project called LibreVR. The FSFE’s sister organisations in North America, has a “Respects Your Freedom” certification program, and I recently have begun working on my hardware design for a wireless VR headset and will soon do regular live streams that document my work on Free Software VR games and hardware.