I have yet to get anything else to look or run as nice as virtual desktop, even stuff that lets you use higher bitrate just ends up bogging down the headsets decoder and not looking better while also having worse latency.

With VD I get a nice looking game at or below 30ms total latency.

And when I play from my computer while at my brother’s or friends houses, it’s 36ms or less latency, but otherwise looks the same.

And of course, when using the actual desktop mode instead of playing VR games, it’s an even bigger leap over the other options. Like <6ms latency, <12ms from other peoples houses. And two 4k 120hz screens, that actually look 4k, despite only having enough physical pixels to support 1440p at the 80 degree fov I have my monitors take up. But since every frame renders a slightly different set of pixels, you basically get a free sort of temporal anti-aliasing that effectively up-scales the resolution of the screen enough to see all the detail the real 4k screen is showing. Not every frame, but enough that your brain sees it anyway.

WiVRn works well, I feel like the video quality is better with it.

Do you have the same ALVR settings on Windows and Linux?

Edit: I reread and realised you didn’t use ALVR on Windows.
If you haven’t changed any settings yet in ALVR, you’ll want to increase the bitrate used for streaming. ~200-300mbs should be easily doable on 5ghz wifi and improve picture quality drastically.
Also look at the foveation settings, these determine how much of your fov has increased quality vs the sides which are less important.

Well ALVR has a plethora of settings to optimize, but even by following the wiki settings, like changing from UDP to TCP and such, my quality was still lower + now I can’t even make ALVR run. Maybe I’ve missed some crucial setting, who knows.