On 2/17/2026 at 12:00 AM, jcomm said:

Would it be a good option for me?

I am probably not going to enrol in the next MS initiative of going as cloudfull as possible, so, I'm finally starting to seriously consider moving to Linux one day.

My PC specs are in my signature, bellow, and my hardware controllers aren't that many:

- Saitek Combat Pro rudder pedals;

- Thrustmaster T.16000;

- Hotas unit of an old, broken, X.52 Pro;

I would accept staying only with X-Plane, and Aerowinx PSX as well as Condorsoaring can perfectly work in Linux too.

I've been following @coastaldriver's thread about his move to Linux, and evey time I read new posts I get more tempted 🙂

Would I miss IL2, DCS and MSFS...?  Sure I would, but I'm getting just too old to run all these sims...

Well, but I'll miss "Aces of Thunder" ( @Litjan 🙂 ) which I just purchased and am really enjoying too...

I couldn’t do it. 

I used to be 100% MacOS (at work, too). And I got into flight sim via XP on MacOS. 

But after realizing all the flight sim options I was missing out on, I built a Win gaming rig and have never looked back. 

im not gonna pretend that I fly in all the sims all the time, and I certainly have a couple in which I almost never fly anymore (P3D and IL2), but the urge does strike now and again, and I’ve just gotta crank up the A2A Civ Mustang or go get my butt beat in the IL2 P-38).

So as much as I enjoy XP (like my new JRX MD902!), I’ve learned there’s just too much I’d miss out on if I didn’t have access to the other sims. 

To be clear, absolutely nothing against Linux, or simplifying one’s life. I’d just choose a different way to cut back.🤙

2 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

No pude hacerlo 

Antes era 100% MacOS (en el trabajo también). Empecé con los simuladores de vuelo con XP en macOS. 

Pero después de darme cuenta de todas las opciones que me estaba perdiendo, construí una plataforma de juegos para Windows y nunca me arrepentí. 

No voy a fingir que vuelo en todos los sims todo el tiempo, y ciertamente tengo un par en los que casi nunca vuelo más (P3D y IL2), pero el impulso me golpea de vez en cuando, y simplemente tengo que poner en marcha el A2A Civ Mustang o ir a que me den una paliza en el IL2 P-38).

Si bien disfruto mucho de XP (¡como mi nuevo JRX MD902!), aprendí que me perdería muchas cosas si no tuviera acceso a los otros Sims. 

Para que quede claro, no tengo absolutamente nada en contra de Linux ni de simplificarse la vida. Simplemente elegiría una forma diferente de ahorrar. 🤙

That is the key.

On 2/18/2026 at 9:09 PM, coastaldriver said:

Yes I had recreated the world for the 1960s courtesy of CalClassic and its devotion to piston liners. Then I got the seaplane bug and redid the world for every seaplane port or base I could find from the 1930s to the 1960s. Alas it required a peculiar library sorter to do scenery. The downloads of it are all still about on the net and the impressive JBK Short S23 was a blast. Really had the KBT Lockheed Electra L188 re-done beautifully Nothing like that comparable in XPlane - has the potential but alas no decent seaplanes except the Boeing 314 and the Hydroz PBY all the rest are just lighties. No big pistons like the DC-4 or DC-6 or the Constellation. DC-3s C-47s are splendidly done - choose your flavour. 

Mine was the 80s. Scraped together lots of stuff from RetroAI, even did some flight plans, paints and retrograded airports and hauled Tom Ruths 727s or my TinFork 732 from airport to airport. Even put the border and wall back in as visual references for when I wanted to haul some soviet military and civilian metal around. Good times, but never got the 80s world completely where I wanted it to be. Just like a model train layout.

Edited February 19Feb 19 by Bjoern

Going to reinstall POP!_OS/Cosmic. Windows is getting more tyrannical with its updates and spyware.  

On 2/22/2026 at 5:26 PM, strider1 said:

Going to reinstall POP!_OS/Cosmic. Windows is getting more tyrannical with its updates and spyware.  

Wayland has a way to go before its ready for daily driving (like at least a decade).

Cosmic haven't even perfected opening the file menu in their text editor yet:

Pretty much guaranteed you will run into catastrophic issues, especially with something as demanding on the graphics drivers as X-Plane (the main focus of wayland until very recently has been software rendering, the hardware acceleration is basically untested, what does exist is very outdated - pre 2013 - made worse by its developers blame shifting for all the known issues that have existed since ~2008....).

Cosmic is the best of a bad bunch.

Cinnamon gives you a everything you could possibly want from where everything has actually been tested and issues known for being resolved quickly rather than 15 years later.

Edited February 24Feb 24 by mSparks

16 hours ago, mSparks said:

Wayland has a way to go before its ready for daily driving (like at least a decade).

Cosmic haven't even perfected opening the file menu in their text editor yet:

Pretty much guaranteed you will run into catastrophic issues, especially with something as demanding on the graphics drivers as X-Plane (the main focus of wayland until very recently has been software rendering, the hardware acceleration is basically untested, what does exist is very outdated - pre 2013 - made worse by its developers blame shifting for all the known issues that have existed since ~2008....).

Cosmic is the best of a bad bunch.

Cinnamon gives you a everything you could possibly want from where everything has actually been tested and issues known for being resolved quickly rather than 15 years later.

Thanks for the info! 

On 2/24/2026 at 4:43 PM, mSparks said:

Wayland has a way to go before its ready for daily driving (like at least a decade).

I've been daily driving Wayland for years now and that is with two very different monitors (Display Port, 144 Hz/VRR and HDMI, 60 Hz) on AMD. No issues. Even NVidia plays along on my laptop.

20 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

I've been daily driving Wayland for years now and that is with two very different monitors (Display Port, 144 Hz/VRR and HDMI, 60 Hz) on AMD. No issues. Even NVidia plays along on my laptop.

Youve been using xwayland, which is a low performance DRI2 version of xserver.

Also probably why you didnt see such an fps perf difference between windows and Linux 

Mspark, you were right about Wayland. A couple of years ag,) like a decade. The world has moved on, you  didn’t.

Wayland (and xwayland) have evolved and are now the default for most modern Linux desktops. 

And most of us are reporting a huge gain in fps, with Wayland. But of course you are you and you pick one example to prove the world otherwise. 
you are a smart man, I have no doubt, but you are rigid in your opinions. And this makes discussing with you tiresome, I am sorry to say that.

2 hours ago, soaring_penguin said:

Mspark, you were right about Wayland. A couple of years ag,) like a decade. The world has moved on, you  didn’t.

Wayland (and xwayland) have evolved and are now the default for most modern Linux desktops. 

And most of us are reporting a huge gain in fps, with Wayland. But of course you are you and you pick one example to prove the world otherwise. 
you are a smart man, I have no doubt, but you are rigid in your opinions. And this makes discussing with you tiresome, I am sorry to say that.

xwayland is still using DRI2, DRI2 was replaced by DRI3 in 2013 in xserver for significant latency improvements

valve is working on dolby vision and HDR support for xlibre/sonicDE for the steam deck (colab with open mandriva).

wayland was funded and pushed by redhat up until around 2023/2022, they mostly either lost their jobs or switched to IBMs "AI' stack after the IBM buyout (the smart ones left on their own), while it lives on in wlroots compositors like cosmic, its currently mostly garbage like the video I posted above.

Two recent reviews

https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-01-04-wayland-sway-in-2026/

The idea behind making it default was that people would report issues and they could be fixed, that fell apart because there is no one working on fixing them.

 

Edited February 26Feb 26 by mSparks

Check this:

Bazzite OS Overview

¹

 

 

Bazzite OS is a custom Fedora Atomic image optimized for Linux gaming and general computing across desktops, handhelds, tablets, and HTPCs. Built on ublue-os with Fedora technology, it integrates expanded hardware support, built-in drivers, and numerous gaming-focused enhancements.

Key Enhancements include:

• Bazzite kernel with HDR support, fsync patches, and extended hardware compatibility.

• Gaming tools preinstalled: LatencyFleX, vkBasalt, MangoHud, OBS VkCapture.

• Full codec support (H264), AMD ROCm runtimes, Xbox controller drivers, DisplayLink.

• Waydroid for Android apps, Distrobox for containerized workflows.

• RGB and peripheral drivers (OpenRGB, OpenRazer, OpenTabletDriver).

• Winesync/Fastsync/NTsync for improved Windows game compatibility.

• Bazzite Portal for easy app installs and tweaks.

21 hours ago, mSparks said:

Youve been using xwayland, which is a low performance DRI2 version of xserver.

Also probably why you didnt see such an fps perf difference between windows and Linux 

And Xwayland is extra slow because it's developed by Wayland people who have absolutely no idea how to properly code something, right? Right?!

If I had seen any disadvantageous performance in Wayland, I would have gone back to X.Org. But I did not, which should tell you that Wayland works just fine. It also comes with the advantage of not having to manage some stupid a## config file to set up displays and deal with the "black screen roulette" after a driver update (hello, NVidia).

 

@jcomm That's not a beginner distro. For a solid, regular one, I highly recommend plain Fedora, which I've helped my 70+ year old father install on his (2016 model year) laptop last weekend because he wants to ultimately replace Windows 10, but dual boot with Linux first. While not the most tech savvy with computers (the TV, on the other hand...) and without use cases beyond document creation, printing, media (music) management or whatever else normal people do, he at least knows how to perform a web search for questions, read a manual and think before he clicks (well, mostly) and speaks English (big advantage with Linux). Since I just know this description triggers a silent "hey, that's basically me" from a few readers, here's an outline of what we did (in case anybody else wants to try):

• We used Fedora's Media Writer to download Fedora's KDE Plasma edition (closer to Windows' feel) to create a bootable USB drive and first spent one or two sessons in the Live environment to get a rough feel for everything. The Live media contains all one (initially) gets from an actual installation minus persistence in settings and additional data. A connection to WiFi worked without issue and his Bluetooth mosue did, too.
• After he was certain he wanted to commit, we made space on the laptop's second disk drive (the one without Windows on it and after having backed up all the data on it in Windows) using KDE's Partition Manager. Growing and shrinking partitions is pretty easy and (95%) safe and Windows has no issue using a resized partition after the process. In the resulting free space, a new partition with the ext4 file system was created because I prefer a mature, no-fuss filesystem and have no use for snapshots. I used this as a basic lesson in Linux partition naming.
• With the new partition in place, we ran Fedora's installer. The trick there was to manually assign mount points, tick all available disks and put the root ("/") folder onto the fresh ext4 partition and the mandatory "/boot" (or was that "/EFI"?) folder onto the EFI partition (where Windows' boot loader sits; no overwriting is taking place). We also found a bug in account creation in Fedora 43 that essentially mandates a strong password (capital and small letters, numbers, signs), as the installer crashed on us when we picked a more...practical one (we changed it after the actual installation). The rest of the installation was straightforward and quick.
• After the reboot, I started geting nervous because the system wouldn't boot or boot back into Windows. Easily fixed by moving Fedora's bootloader to the top of the list in the BIOS. Now it boots to GRUB (Fedora's boot manager) reliably. Shame on me for forgetting, but I did not have to fix any boot issues for a long time (and use a different loader).
• Once everything was in place, we did initial updates in KDE Discover, I showed him around KDE's settings menu (and how you can find everything by typing into the tart menu search bar) and how to access the Windows partitions in Dolphin.
• We've connected his printer (modern HP with WiFi and Bluetooth) without any issues whatsoever(!), including scanning (via Skanlite) and he got his first taste of the terminal/Konsole and super user privileges by checking and restarting the Bluetooth service because the mouse wouldn't connect.
• One thing we had to set up right away is limiting the number of kernels that can be installed by the DNF package manager to two (using these instructions). I've also pointed him to Fedora's documentation in case he gets stuck, as it is pretty extensive and professionally maintained. Plus there's always a web search with "Fedora [issue or error message]".

And that's where we left it for now, at a usable OS where he can poke around in. No "What's it doing now?!" phone calls so far.

If he was interested in running X-Plane on this device (which he is not; believe me, I've tried), the next steps I'd perform with him would involve:

• Installing the proprietary NVidia drivers using these instructions.
• Probably creating another ext4 partition for X-Plane (faster) and auto-mount it at boot or auto-mount the present NTFS data partition (slower), using tutorials like these.
• Connecting a game controller (joystick or gamepad) via USB or Bluetooth and check if it works in KDE's game controller menu (it should if it not too exotic).
• Downloading and installing X-Plane and go for a test flight.

Yes, the last part is shameless bait and a bridge to the subject of this thread. The worst about installing Windows is over when X-Plane runs and the most critical parts are partition creation, partition assignments during installation and the boot loader order

I do not expect my old man to go all in right away, but step by step. Involving some tinkering, geting frustrated, leaving it be, getting frustrated by Windows, getting back in. Build the habit from experience. Switching from Windows took me a few months myself.

2 hours ago, Bjoern said:

And Xwayland is extra slow because it's developed by Wayland people who have absolutely no idea how to properly code something, right? Right?!

 

 

 

Pretty sure ripping out all the desktop hardware acceleration stuff provided by the AMD and Nvidia drivers has a lot to do with it yes, along with not using any of the open source improvements developed since 2013.

Although no one that originally developed wayland is working on it anymore, like the xbox leadership recently they all resigned.

Nvidia did actually offer them a better alternative to bring it up to modern standards - EGLStreams - but they refused to adopt it, because it didn't fit the in car entertainment use case wayland was developed for, in other news, since wayland is mostly abandonware now (most alternative developers like cosmic switched wlroots) toyota just switched to flutter instead.

xwayland itself is only intended for undeveloped, old applications that aren't maintained any more.

None of which match an X-Plane use case.

2 hours ago, Bjoern said:

If I had seen any disadvantageous performance in Wayland, I would have gone back to X.Org. But I did not, which should tell you that Wayland works just fine. It also comes with the advantage of not having to manage some stupid a## config file to set up displays and deal with the "black screen roulette" after a driver update (hello, NVidia).

Didn't you say you didn't see

wasn't it more

There is no situation where wayland is better than a modern xserver, plenty where it is significantly worse. 

 

Edited February 27Feb 27 by mSparks

Since I have a HDR monitor and I use VR, AI recommends CatchyOS Plasma edition or Pop!_OS. 

 

Since you have an

HDR monitor and want to explore VR, your choice narrows significantly. Linux Mint is currently a poor fit because it lacks HDR support. 

Between the remaining two, here is how they stack up for a beginner with your specific hardware:

• CachyOS: The best technical choice for HDR. It uses the latest KDE Plasma desktop, which currently has the most advanced HDR implementation on Linux. While it is Arch-based (usually for experts), CachyOS includes a Gaming Wizard that simplifies installing everything you need for HDR and VR with a few clicks.
• Pop!_OS: A strong middle ground. Its new COSMIC desktop (released late 2024/early 2025) was built from the ground up with modern display technologies like HDR in mind. It is much more beginner-friendly than CachyOS but may require a bit more waiting for the absolute latest VR driver tweaks. 

 

 

 

HDR & VR Compatibility Breakdown

• HDR Support: Requires a Wayland session. CachyOS (KDE) is the current leader here, allowing you to toggle HDR in system settings. Pop!_OS (COSMIC) also supports it, but Linux Mint (Cinnamon) does not currently support HDR.
• VR (Virtual Reality): VR on Linux is mostly handled through SteamVR or Monado/WiVRn (for Quest headsets).
  • CachyOS: Provides the newest kernels and "bleeding edge" drivers, which are often required to fix common VR bugs on Linux.
  • Pop!_OS: Excellent if you have an NVIDIA card, as it handles those proprietary drivers better than almost any other distro.
• Ease of Use: Pop!_OS feels like a finished product for users coming from Windows/macOS. CachyOS is very fast but may require you to occasionally use the terminal to manage updates. 

 

 

 

Recommendation

1. For the best HDR/VR experience now: Choose CachyOS with the KDE Plasma desktop. Its "Gaming" meta-package will set up your environment for high-end hardware more effectively than standard distros.
2. For a smoother learning curve: Choose Pop!_OS. It is stable, great for NVIDIA users, and the new COSMIC interface is designed for high-end modern monitors. 

What graphics card (NVIDIA or AMD) and VR headset are you planning to use?

What about Solus OS ?

Edited February 27Feb 27 by jcomm