The most irritating has been me not being able to start MSFS 2024 sometimes, not always,m during the last few days since my update to a Insider win 11 release... 

AI threat protection blocks FS 2024 DLLs sometimes, and the game can't even start 😕

Disabling it is tricky, but can be done, for now...

As a linux nerd, everything in that post is entertaining.

10 hours ago, mSparks said:

meanwhile, my cinnamon install is all like

Is this based on WiVRn + OpenXR via Monado? If so, does this still require SteamVR in the pipeline? I'm a bit out of the loop regarding WiVRn.

 

9 hours ago, Aglos77 said:

The funny thing is that I know plenty of people who complain about Microsoft’s privacy practices and yet use Google’s services every day 😜

Getting rid of MS products and services is comparatively easy (Windows --> Linux, Office --> Libreoffice or Softmaker Office or Onlyoffice, Copilot --> Lumo), getting rid of Android and its App-Ecosystem, however, is a bit more difficult. Something I have not figured out yet.

 

4 hours ago, jcomm said:

The most irritating has been me not being able to start MSFS 2024 sometimes, not always,m during the last few days since my update to a Insider win 11 release... 

AI threat protection blocks FS 2024 DLLs sometimes, and the game can't even start 😕

Disabling it is tricky, but can be done, for now...

🤣

Now I wanna hear no more complaints that Linux requires tinkering. 😉

Edited March 25Mar 25 by Bjoern

7 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

Now how long did it take to load that 1.4meg floppy disk. Never had issues with win10 and still havnt

I couldn't find my floppy disk; I must have misplaced it. But booting from my hard drive took 14.5 seconds.

6 hours ago, jcomm said:

The most irritating has been me not being able to start MSFS 2024 sometimes, not always,m during the last few days since my update to a Insider win 11 release... 

Why are you on an insider build of windows unless you love being a beta tester. Insider builds are prerelease bleeding-edge versions intended for testing/feedback. I personally never run an insider build on my primary computer.  I'm assuming you are reporting your issues at least.

Edited March 25Mar 25 by brinx

14 minutes ago, brinx said:

I couldn't find my floppy disk; I must have displaced it. But booting from my hard drive took 14.5 seconds.

Why are you on an insider build of windows unless you love being a beta tester. Insider builds are prerelease bleeding-edge versions intended for testing/feedback. I personally never run an insider build on my primary computer.  I'm assuming you are reporting your issues at least.

Me always after the motivation to uninstall....

2 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Is this based on WiVRn + OpenXR via Monado? If so, does this still require SteamVR in the pipeline? I'm a bit out of the loop regarding WiVRn. 😉

😉

ALVR does wifi streaming for the quest 3 from steamVR

WayVR is a steamVR overlay that lets you bring the desktop into the headset while VR apps like xplane are running. (So you I never have to go into the PC room).

The "what I see" is recorded by casting from the headset to firefox on the desktop, and capturing that with OBS.

Theoretically it should also work with monado/wivrn. But not tried them recently. Valve seem to have "fixed their word not allowed" with steamVR.

2 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Office --> Libreoffice or Softmaker Office or Onlyoffice

And if you need MS office, it works far better on mac anyway.

Very, very very satisfied with my linux PC, MacBook for mobile, PS5 PSVR2 for gaming trio. I currently want for nothing.

On 2/26/2026 at 1:19 PM, Bjoern said:

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. 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.

Well, I've got an old Dell Gaming laptop that's still running fine, but can't be upgraded to Win 11. And I don't too much feel like paying for extended security patches, either.

And since I have a primary work/gaming rig where it's more practical to use Windows, I think I'm gonna follow Bjoern's advice above and go from there.

It's been a heckuva long time since I (mostly) switched from MacOS to Windows, but if I could survive THAT transition successfully, I can probably muddle through this one, too.

And while running XP isn't the primary motivation, it IS a really nice benefit waiting at the end of it. 🙂

23 hours ago, mSparks said:

ALVR does wifi streaming for the quest 3 from steamVR

WayVR is a steamVR overlay that lets you bring the desktop into the headset while VR apps like xplane are running. (So you I never have to go into the PC room).

The "what I see" is recorded by casting from the headset to firefox on the desktop, and capturing that with OBS.

Theoretically it should also work with monado/wivrn. But not tried them recently. Valve seem to have "fixed their word not allowed" with steamVR.

Oh, alright. Thought it was WiVRn only. And yes, SteamVR is rock solid for me by now, even its beta releases.

 

23 hours ago, mSparks said:

And if you need MS office, it works far better on mac anyway.

Well, that makes sense because the amount of professional Mac users who require something that produces (industry) standardized document formats is not small at all. Good secondary income for MS.

 

17 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Well, I've got an old Dell Gaming laptop that's still running fine, but can't be upgraded to Win 11. And I don't too much feel like paying for extended security patches, either.

And since I have a primary work/gaming rig where it's more practical to use Windows, I think I'm gonna follow Bjoern's advice above and go from there.

It's been a heckuva long time since I (mostly) switched from MacOS to Windows, but if I could survive THAT transition successfully, I can probably muddle through this one, too.

Good luck. If you want something closer to MacOS for the nostalgia, pick Fedora's GNOME spin instead of Plasma. And if you don't want to dual boot, you can save yourself the hassle with all the partitioning and simply wipe the entire disk clean.

Edited March 26Mar 26 by Bjoern

I’m currently switching back to Windows; my experience with Steam has been very good, and the same goes for Xplane. I’d even considered sticking with OpenSUSE for good – I loved Btrfs – but there’s the Nvidia issue.

I’ve been struggling with it for quite a few days; I’ve read everything, but in the end, on my system, Nvidia doesn’t work properly  with G06, G07, kernel 6.19 or 6.18 LTS, X11, Wayland, etc. 

Quite simply, on my system it has issues in Linux when it comes to hibernating or performing a clean shutdown; there was one occasion when I had to unplug the power cable just to get the computer to boot with minimal VGA output.

I was just trying out shutdown scripts for systemd as a last resort, but honestly, I’ve run out of patience, especially after scouring the web and reading about so many cases with similar or related issues. 

I’d install a power strip with a power cut-off switch to ensure the graphics card really does switch off, but my wife also uses the computer and I don’t want it to have a problematic start-up whilst I’m away from home.

AMD has a significant advantage over Nvidia on Linux, from what I can see.

 

Yes  I honestly think it is Linux for work, Windows for gaming... 

Maybe one day it changes...

I wasn't able to make DCS and in particular the c130j Run, Aces of Thunder couldn't even see scenery... MSFS would have to Run ir from Steam... Nah, not for me... I can't use xp12 ONLY, no no..., otherwise I might try to stay ...

Edited March 29Mar 29 by jcomm

On 3/26/2026 at 3:02 PM, Bjoern said:

 

Good luck. If you want something closer to MacOS for the nostalgia, pick Fedora's GNOME spin instead of Plasma. 

Not gnome or kde, because it will be years (if ever) before they support

https://github.com/zquestz/plank-reloaded

That and show all windows are pretty much my must haves for my desktop now - which is why I can never go back to windows.

Edit, and since I hate it when people just say "use this" but dont show what using it looks like, and I need a lot more practice recording stuff like this, plank and show all windows looks like this (saw it was missing in the earlier video)

 

Edited March 29Mar 29 by mSparks

5 hours ago, Aglos77 said:

AMD has a significant advantage over Nvidia on Linux, from what I can see.

Yes, it does. Until the open source driver for NVidia is on par with the proprietary one in terms of performance (which may be never), I'll stick to Team Red. Which is admittedly a bit diffcult for laptops because each and every of these stupid things comes with a NVidia GPU.

 

3 hours ago, mSparks said:

[video]

WayVR works nicely, by the way, although I still need to try it for real within an X-Plane context (LittleNavMap window sharing or so).

Edited March 29Mar 29 by Bjoern

On 3/29/2026 at 7:18 PM, Bjoern said:

WayVR works nicely, by the way, although I still need to try it for real within an X-Plane context (LittleNavMap window sharing or so).

Really well, it's completely changed how I'm interacting with both my desktop and X-Plane. Just leaving ALVR/SteamVR running 24/7 now, the idle use is no more than without them and picking up the headset firing up ALVR (if needed) on that and double tapping B is far easier than ssh'ing into my desktop when I'm not at my desk in all instances. If the machine is busy working I can check progress, if it's finished I can immediately sneak in a quick X-Plane session. probably more time in X-Plane VR in the last couple of weeks than X-Plane for all of last year (lot of Population One as well, would be more Aces of thunder on the PSVR2, but apparently Sony have big issues with accepting credit cards online, so to buy it I need to buy gift cards from a retailer.. omfg).

My new fun thing to do is watch movies lay down in the cockpit of the 744 (in VR). Headset plugged into a battery bank so it doesnt go flat. Flight test complete, matrix resurrections rewarched. Everything was great. Movie lasted longer than the flight so i shut the 744 down connected the causeway and finished watching.

Very prophetic "unplugging" when it finished.

I have xplane installed on both windows and Mint, the only thing that stops me moving over is the lack of Mobiflight, I have a lot of custom hardware on arduinos that I enjoy interfacing with MF. The winwing script works fantastic though for getting their products working. 

Maybe someone knows an alternative although I'm sure it's going to be code your own scripts for the hardware 😂