Sorry I understand the reasoning behind this making it easier but I personally don't think this is worth merging simply because the workaround is noted in the wiki and its for an unmaintained driver(amdvlk)

I'm going to close this because the feature in this form already exists with direct launch (only in nightlies currently), any further work should be done in a separate PR (which should also be easier to work with for you).

Tho a more sophisticated direct launch in linux may be worth implementing (using steamvr on linux has been on life support for about a year now whilst we're trying to replace it, that's why it's not been done, but since that keeps dragging on it may still be worthwhile).

That should however programmatically detect the necessary environment variables and then just directly execute that without any intermediary scripts. If you're willing to work on this there are a few things to consider:
It should be controllable in settings, it should fall back to the steam launch with a warning, it should use xshell instead. We already have a lot of detection logic, all it does is just output a bunch of warnings tho, but you should be reusing that.

Totally on you if you wanna do this, but it'd be cool and I think pretty doable.

PS: Sorry for taking so long to respond, I took a holiday break.