Yes and no. And the "no" seems underappreciated.
I normally run my Vive and Lenovo WMR at 30 fps on an old laptop with Intel integrated graphics. So why hasn't it made people sick? Camera passthrough AR helps. Likely the "comfort mode"-like tunnel-vision effect of not doing barrel or chromatic aberration correction. Perhaps not doing predictive tracking, so lag but no judder. Maybe "visible out the corner of your eye" framing. Maybe something else.
Most VR reporting starts from an assumption of games. Games, games, always games. So "you are there" immersion, with no avoidable visible artifacts, no AR, etc. So 90 fps, constant latency, high GPU and HMD bandwidth demands. But if you don't care about games, if you just want a desktop replacement/alternative... the design constraint space looks very different.
But yes, their focus seems Unity and games.
It sounds like you might know something about the desktop experience. Do you have any thoughts, or useful links?
Tl;dr: wait for Xmas.
A current design point: gaming laptop; Windows; SteamVR; a virtual desktop like http://bigscreenvr.com/ ; HDMI dummies as mentioned by @sgtmas2006, so Windows thinks it has more monitors; RDP/VNC/etc to a linux VM. All off the shelf.
But gaming laptops are likely "annoyingly unportable laptops". If you can segregate when you want portable vs monitors, something like a Lenovo X1 Carbon is portable, and has Thunderbolt 3, so you can plug in a rather less portable external gpu enclosure.
Current HMD resolution is still quite low. If you use big desktop monitors for their resolution (eg, lots of text), rather than merely their size (eg, vision impairment), that's a problem. If the big monitors are full of little terminal windows (eg, ops), I saw a report of someone being happy.
https://varjo.com/ , despite its website, appears on track[1] to release a much higher resolution HMD this year. For only "under $10k". With that, you could just render your big monitors. Current software support is unclear.
So a takeaway could be "wait for Xmas 2018".
> what to expect if I were to buy a headset and plug it into my laptop running linux
The HMD shows up as a normal monitor. (In future, that may require telling `xrandr` "yes, I know it's an HMD, just treat it as a normal monitor please".) From there, it's like google cardboard. There's a border region you can't see, and each eye gets half the screen. If you close one eye, you can just drag/open windows and use them normally. I open a full-screen browser window, and render stereo for 3D. The pixels are magnified, and can easily be seen individually.
As for tracking and controllers... attention to linux largely evaporated when VR transitioned from niche to chasing the Windows gaming market. I know of nothing usable with Windows MR HMDs. (There was/is? a project to unpack their odd camera format, and then one might run say ORB-SLAM2 for tracking, but that's all diy). And doesn't gget you Windows MR controllers. For Vive, there's SteamVR and WebVR, but I believe both still require major setup effort, with buggy results. http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Vrui/ exists. As do low-level Vive device drivers.
> ... with intel graphics
Ah, that is very not mainstream. I know of only my own stack[2] easily available. And that's for Vive tracking. Tracking Windows MR HMDs then requires taping on a Vive controller, or diy software dev.
So unless your usage patterns happen to mesh nicely with rather severe current tech constraints... using VR to replace big monitors isn't quite ripe yet. Maybe by Xmas. But once that threshold is passed, I expect a rapid and large impact.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12102/varjo-announces-shippin... [2] https://github.com/mncharity/node-webvr-alt-stack
Why not submit an issue or get involved with the project? It seems like you have expertise in the area that they would appreciate.
I'm sure everyone agrees this is a big achievement for these students, move along.
Not everyone has the time to volunteer and not every comment has to say it is a cool project.
Allez, développez votre création et votre histoire à long terme, c'est ça qui compte!
Well, GearVR and Daydream suck but at least don't make you sick if you stay sit and avoid apps with artificial movement.
Carmack has long lectures about that issue.