With end of life of Windows 10 now official I decided to ditch Windows as an OS for good and put my PC to good use as a dedicated Linux system. Backed up and copied as much as I could of the stuff from XPlane that I thought I would need again and all my Windows generated files docs etc. Made the plunge. I opted for a Ubuntu distribution as it is the system used by XPlane after doing the try a few others. Ubuntu suited my needs and tastes I guess and It has been many years since I worked with Linux and the Old Red Hart system and terminal. So lot of stuff to get used to working in terminal does not worry me at all and I was pleasantly surprised at sheer quantity and variety of apps operating via GUI's to do stuff that go with Linux these days. Only had to resort to terminal mode to fix up a couple of issues caused by other parties and to speed up other stuff. Being able to do a command line terminal check, fetch from the internet and install and fix was done so well it made my head spin - amazing. 

Biggest hiccups - getting the right NVIDIA drivers installed and the system to recognise them and use them instead of a default XWindow GPU. Getting Google Chrome to work was a pain but eventually it played the game too (Why Google people might ask - simple we are wedded to it for our emails, various other sundry accounts etc about the place and as it is for most folk these days )  Google does a lot of good house keeping stuff , devices aligned and synchronised (Several android phones and a tablet in my household that is why). That is all working. Added in some stuff that was GPL that I used in MS Windows day and I always knew was built for Linus - good idea all those apps behaved well. Other than that just getting used to the differences in using the system - no biggy but important you build up a lot of strange habits with Windows over the years. 

XP12 migration was not by the way trouble free - I had to re download the whole word not allowed thing this time for Linux - that was at times frustrating (my telco and broadband limitations) but was finally completed today. Seems to be a few differences with XPlane in Linux to Windows in terms of the menu interface but otherwise that's it. 

First couple of test flights were after some irritating issues getting the joystick calibrated were well splendid. Smooth in view changes, peripherals like the Logitech Joystick now seem to be less quirky or troublesome with Linux in XPlane. All works as advertised. 

The most amazing thing is loading times (very fast) and FPS I am now seeing 60-80 FPS whereas on MS Win 10 never much better than 35 really sometimes worse. I will admit this is a vanilla installation and I am yet to put back a heap of aircraft and Custom Scenery that I have ready to go again but nonetheless the Graphic sliders are all at max and were set by Laminar like that on the installation with a now dated I guess NVIDIA RTX 2070. The other surprise was I had always thought that my Intel CPU was only 6 cores, Linux is telling me it is actually 12 cores which is a surprise but with multi-threading now being implemented with Laminar won't give that a second thought. All the plugins are working but I will miss X-Organiser and until I can see if I can get it to work via Wine. Gave up on the ORBX Linux app (I was hoping to use it to fix up the symbolic link so guess I will have to do that the long way!) when it turned out it would not work with Linux without an image reader called FUSE which is a no no on the Ubuntu system and will actually break the installation. So not sure where to go with that one!

The Linux security is outstanding and not even Google can rummage about without me knowing. No more crappy Windows defender or third party security systems.

Happy - you bet should have done it sooner. This is not a how to by the way for Linux but I just thought I would let people know that Linux and XPlane are a good match just as Linux and my PC seem faster, smoother and well I can at last really see the speed and capacity of my SSD's, CPU and GPU. 

For the dedicated Linux users at AVSIM (yep you right) for the MS Windows folk - unless you need it for their flight sim or something very unusual - Seriously consider the change - it is more than worth it.

 

 

Great move, @coastaldriver, I've been on (Ubuntu) Linux forever, and X-Plane is one of the simulations/games (ie graphic heavy software) that doesn't need any compatibility layer, and where native Linux runs as well if not better than other OS's.

I'm very grateful to Laminar for that fact.

2 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

XP12 migration was not by the way trouble free - I had to re download the whole word not allowed thing this time for Linux - that was at times frustrating (my telco and broadband limitations) but was finally completed today. Seems to be a few differences with XPlane in Linux to Windows in terms of the menu interface but otherwise that's it.

No, you do not, as >95% of X-Plane is identical across OSes. You should have simply transferred your Windows installation and then run XP's installer to have it fetch the Linux specific stuff like binaries. That's 300 MB - at worst. After that, you only need to weed out those add-ons that are Windows-only and that's it.

 

2 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

First couple of test flights were after some irritating issues getting the joystick calibrated were well splendid. Smooth in view changes, peripherals like the Logitech Joystick now seem to be less quirky or troublesome with Linux in XPlane. All works as advertised.

Yes, Linux and Windows handle hardware axis detection differently, so you'll need a different control profile for each OS.

 

2 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

The most amazing thing is loading times (very fast)

Been saying this for years, but nobody ever wanted to listen. 🙄 😉

 

2 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

The other surprise was I had always thought that my Intel CPU was only 6 cores, Linux is telling me it is actually 12 cores which is a surprise but with multi-threading now being implemented with Laminar won't give that a second thought.

Linux takes hyperthreading/SMT into account as cores, Windows does not. Both make use of the entire CPU though.

 

2 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

Gave up on the ORBX Linux app (I was hoping to use it to fix up the symbolic link so guess I will have to do that the long way!) when it turned out it would not work with Linux without an image reader called FUSE which is a no no on the Ubuntu system and will actually break the installation. So not sure where to go with that one!

FUSE3 is installed by default on Ubuntu (says Google), so no point in installing the older FUSE or FUSE2 drivers. The AppImage of ORBX Central worked fine for me last time I've tried, but there's no need for that if you can access your downloaded data. All the sceneries are in "ORBX/Library/xp12" anyway and just need to be symbolically linked with "ln -s [path to scenery in ORBX/Library/xp12]" from a terminal called up from the "Custom Scenery" folder.

 

2 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

For the dedicated Linux users at AVSIM (yep you right) for the MS Windows folk - unless you need it for their flight sim or something very unusual - Seriously consider the change - it is more than worth it.

But please not for out of the box Ubuntu, as GNOME is an awful desktop environment. Linux distributions with KDE Plasma offer a much more Windows-like experience (without the dumbed down W11 stuff), making the transition easier.

On a slightly tangential note, has anyone tried setting up X-Plane on Bazzite? Just curious. Thinking about setting up a linux-based gaming PC but using Bazzite OS so that I can run my Windows-based games as well as native linux X-plane.

Any Linux distro can be made to run Windows stuff when the correct packages like WINE (or Proton in Steam) are installed. From what I can gather, Bazzite just offers them out of the box.

Since Linux distributions are free, you may as well "distro hop" until you find one that suits your needs. But please nothing close to Debian, unless you still want to be in the stone age while X-Plane already requires space age libraries.

4 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Been saying this for years, but nobody ever wanted to listen. 🙄 😉

Is a dual boot Windows 11 / Linux easy to set up?

8 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

For the dedicated Linux users at AVSIM (yep you right) for the MS Windows folk - unless you need it for their flight sim or something very unusual - Seriously consider the change - it is more than worth it.

I like my Linux box, but 95% of the software I use runs better on my Windows 11 box (drivers and accelerated hardware features).  But agree, Linux security is generally better provided you validate the trusted sources (be aware that has been considerably malware and other nasties floating around for Linux and Windows and Visual Studio under "trusted sources" ... the bad actors continue to evolve their game).

But I wouldn't suggest anyone "Change" ... I would suggest "augment or add another box" as there is no good reason to place all your eggs in one basket, diversity is good.

Dual boot is easy enough for some of the linux distros to install but it's honestly not recommended if everything is on the same disk. You need to use the linux bootloader to get access to both OSes at boot and window update is known to occasionally scramble it when they share disk real estate. Best option is to have 2 separate drives and set mobo to boot to the linux drive by default.

I vaguely recall seeing the ability to add linux to the windows bootloader but it was painful compared to linux's approach. Latter setup process is automated and will never attack windows' turf.

5 hours ago, SayAgain said:

but 95% of the software I use runs better on my Windows 11 box

100% of those run better on mac..

Very happy with my hardware (although plan to replace the rtx3070 with a Rtx5080 this week):

High end PC hardware running linux

MacBook air for laptop and non linux friendly software

Quest 3 for gaming and Xplane VR

We aren't 18 years old anymore, there is no need to compromise.

2 hours ago, mSparks said:

100% of those run better on mac..

Ha ha … no, not even close.  I have an Apple Mac Studio M4 and iPad Pro M4 on the MacOS, iOS side using DaVinci resolve/fusion and Adobe Pr/Ae and same software suite on my AMD 9975WX with two nVidia 5090s and 256GB ECC RDIMM … they will run circles around my Mac.

The Mac M4 has no GPU upgrade option and it performs about the same as an nVidia 4070.  

Don’t get me wrong, I love my MacOS, much better than Windows 11 … but when I want performance I go to my AMD threadripper box or my other gaming PC (AMD 9950X3D - 5090) on Windows 11.

3 hours ago, SayAgain said:

DaVinci resolve

About 10% slower on windows

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/davinci-resolve-14-performance-windows-vs-linux-1126/?srsltid=AfmBOopLTHnzr36rLSMPPIneAF0ejtPq2GmszBkG84Rxdf1axwpgStr6

But since its memory heavy, responsiveness will be the most obvious difference.

Edited December 25, 2025Dec 25 by mSparks

13 hours ago, blingthinger said:

Dual boot is easy enough for some of the linux distros to install but it's honestly not recommended if everything is on the same disk.

I have two 4Tb external drives so could install Linux to that.  If X-Plane 12 runs better in Linux maybe worth a try 

2 hours ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

If X-Plane 12 runs better in Linux

I think that benefit depends on the distro but if that's the primary/only experiment, then just boot into your iso of choice, mount the desired ntfs partition, and run xp from there. Aside from Arch, they all generally take you to a fully functional desktop environment prior to starting the installer. You won't have to permanently install a thing. Depending on the distro you might have to install a few small libraries to run xp but that won't require a reboot. I recently heard that from within the XP installer (settings menu) you can select the OS of choice and install the needed linux files from within windows before booting up the iso.

And now that I type the above....I remember that you have nvidia gpu no? That might complicate things for the live session. I believe most if not all distros boot with the opensource drivers which are not as good as the proprietary ones. Installing the latter would require a reboot and hence live boot wouldn't work.

I've been using Macs for years (Since 2003), but I was looking at finally replacing my Macbook with a laptop running Linux (Dual-booting for Windows games, and Linux for work and X-Plane) and this might be the push I need to go for it. I was looking at these custom build laptops that are well supported on Linux https://frame.work/pl/en/laptop16. Sadly, it seems 32GB is the max RAM I can top out at (I currently have 96GB which I make good use of in Photoshop), which considering the price of RAM these days might be a downgrade somewhat. 

 

 

 

 

4 hours ago, blingthinger said:

mount the desired ntfs partition

ntfs format is most of the problem, especially on ssds when it was designed for old and slow hdds.

Even HDD tech has come a very long way since that came out in 1993...

Edited December 25, 2025Dec 25 by mSparks