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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Wow, is there any indication of an alternative? Or are they just going to brick everyone's WMR headsets (except HoloLens of course, because that's their one)?

Edit: As far as I can tell they're just yanking support from Windows and tough bikkies. I asked Bing about it and it basically said to buy a different headset or hope a third party releases alternative software that can run the headsets. Oh and also no you can't prevent Windows from auto-updating and disabling it.

Extremely disappointing behaviour on MS' part. I can understand them sunsetting development, but actively rendering fully functional devices unusable is criminal.

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After what MS did with Windows Phone and the first Lumia headsets*, I think you need to be crazy to release hardware that depends on a not-yet-established MS product. They're very good at keeping their successful products backwards compatible and at least somewhat supported for years, but they can dump unproven products like led disregarding any kind of marketing push.

* Nokia's first Lumia smartphones released with an older version of Windows Phone, while MS was publically working on the Windows 8 push for a common OS across all form factors. They promised everyone in huge marketing campaigns that the Lumias would be upgradeable to the new Windows Phone 8, which all the marketing was pushing for. Fast forward two months from the release, they announce that no, they would not upgrade and you'll have to buy a whole new phone if you made the mistake of buying a first generation Lumia.

They announced this a long time ago.

WMR headsets work on Linux pretty well nowadays.

Google search results says in Nov. 2026/2027:

> Is WMR discontinued? "As of November 1, 2026 for consumers and November 1, 2027 for commercial customers, Windows Mixed Reality will no longer be available for download via the Mixed Reality Portal app, Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR, and Steam VR beta, and we will discontinue support." Dec 27, 2023

> WMR headsets work on Linux pretty well nowadays.

Works pretty well as in 'apt-get install wmr-for-linux' or as in 'spend three weeks setting up a build environment for some hairy proof-of-concept code which isn't compatible with SteamVR games'? WMR is one of the last things really tying me to Windows, if it's practical to use on Linux I could see myself switching back.

Works pretty well as in, "Install Monado using your distribution's package manager, set it as your default OpenXR runtime, hit three buttons to get Valve to begrudgingly respect system defaults instead of the closed-source 'Open'VR runtime."

Optically-tracked WMR controllers work, depending on how new of a build your distribution has and the type, but WMR controllers are generally considered to be pretty bad to begin with. You can use a different style of controller with a WMR headset if desired.

That said, building Monado isn't hard if your distribution doesn't currently have a version that supports WMR controllers. The repo lists all of the dependencies you need, and what they're called for popular distros. It also tells you the exact things you need to run to get it to build; you can just copy and paste the build instructions after installing its dependencies. You can probably get it done within ten minutes.

Optically tracked WMR controllers do not work yet in Monado. Some people have code to do the optical part of the tracking, but there is a bit of reverse engineering left to synchronize the IMUs and control the LED brightness to enable sensor fusion.

Hand tracking however does work.

Can't you use basalt for controller tracking?

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mateosss/basalt https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mateosss/basalt/-/blob/main/d...

Announcing this long ago doesn't make it any less shitty that a fully working still relevant and expensive VR device is now a paperweight. Keeping a minimal framework alive so that the devices can be used with e.g. steam would have been the right thing to do.

Also, no one using WMR devices on Windows wants to bother with Linux. Most of us were using the device with things not available on Linux, and even if they were we don't want to run Linux on a desktop. It's not a solution.

Then don't.

> Also, no one using WMR devices on Windows wants to bother with Linux. Most of us were using the device with things not available on Linux, and even if they were we don't want to run Linux on a desktop.

Cheaper headsets for Linux users, then! It's a solution in one way.

Most users of WMR headsets had a Reverb G2 because it was by far the cheapest headset with its featureset, and were willing to bother with the issues that WMR brings and tinker around.

I wouldn't call it pretty well, not quite yet. The Monado driver has come a long way, but doing anything useful with it still has too much legwork involved for the majority of WMR users, not including the switch to Linux. Although since the announcement, work on WMR-specific stuff seems to have sped up, so hopefully the situation improves.

I also recall seeing a working demo of hand tracking for WMR (maybe just the G2?), so that's neat.

https://monado.freedesktop.org/ Monado OpenXR platform https://stardustxr.org/ Stardust XR display server

Microsoft is making Linux more attractive by the day. I wonder if they'll ever get to regret that.

The official deprecation was made in Dec 2023. Removing it in the next feature update is too soon. Lots of people still having working WMR units, so this feels super cheap.

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