OKAY so,

Finally carve out the time to troubleshoot and figure out whatever crap was going on with steamvr and my ALVR install after swapping my travel PC to SteamOS. Currently in a hotel with plenty of wireless traffic so I have bitrate set low, and I could probably refine some other alvr settings but I got steamvr working, despite that funky update, on SteamOS 3.8.+ with Intel graphics on the desktop mode.

I'll probably see if I can do it from the big screen standard mode later after adding some shortcuts to my non-steam games programs library for the alvr dashboard and see if I can increase the wireless bitrate once I move from this hotel to a airbnb now that FIFA is over and the lodging sites are putting up actual availabilities again...

But it DOES work! Wish they'd go and add more support for other GPUs for VR steam link already, but this will have to do for now unless I wanna figure out yet another alternative like WyVRn. Steam link for flat screen game streaming to the headset works fine though.