X-Plane 11.30 Released As The Best Linux-Supported Flight Simulator

[Mark Rose]

Very cool but not yet at X-Plane' level :-)

One killer X-Plane feature is native VR support, which changes everything especially when flying helicopters.

What's the best VR gear for Linux?

[Zoll]

The best is FlightGear. X Plane can't beat its price, and modding community.
Free Open Source wins over proprietary commercial product.

There is absolutely no comparison between FlightGear and XPlane. Only someone who is not really into flight simulation would say something like this. You might as well compare MS Paint with Photoshop. I'm quite thankful for Laminar to even support Linux given we only make up about ~1.4% of the total user base. But it's this toxic anti-commercial sentiment that's making companies shy away from Linux.

[Kemosabe]

Maybe it has changed but I remember that not so long ago this support was limited to proprietary drivers, no Mesa support. This was not much an issue back in the time when Intel GPUs were not enough powerful for flight simulation and AMD still had fglrx but now, most AMD users have open source AMDGPU, which is much more convenient to use than proprietary drivers and have better performances in lots of cases, and Intel's GPU have enough power for this application. Only Nvidia users can be satisfied by a software that only supports proprietary drivers. So I hope that X-Plane is now usable with Mesa or will be soon (with Vulkan maybe).

It always worked with MESA. By default it used to exit with a message but there is also some flag which allows you to force a start. The only reason you need the flag is, that the devs only want to support two drivers on Linux. Support in terms of dealing with questions in the forums. From my experience though it worked most of the time flawlessly.

[ALRBP]

It always worked with MESA. By default it used to exit with a message but there is also some flag which allows you to force a start. The only reason you need the flag is, that the devs only want to support two drivers on Linux. Support in terms of dealing with questions in the forums. From my experience though it worked most of the time flawlessly.

I ran it (10) with this flag a few years ago, and it launched but the textures were replaced by just black. The terrain was completely black, with light effects still working. It was on an AMD GPU and worked perfectly fine with fglrx, but not with RadeonSI/Mesa.

[parkerwb]

I cannot speak for AMD hardware

I use X-Plane 11 all the time with just a lowly little AMD 2200g (overclocked to 1600mhz though) Vega 8 and get 30fps+ @ 1080p with "medium" settings on a "cloudy" day. It's very enjoyable and very stable and I'm seeing upper 70s/low 80s temps with stock AMD cooler so within specs. Hard to beat that for <$100 APU. X-Plane is the best.

[parkerwb]

I use X-Plane 11 all the time

Probably worth noting that's under Debian buster 4.19.0-1-amd64 and mesa 18.2.8-2 amdgpu 2.4.95-1

[Ansla]

I ran it (10) with this flag a few years ago, and it launched but the textures were replaced by just black. The terrain was completely black, with light effects still working. It was on an AMD GPU and worked perfectly fine with fglrx, but not with RadeonSI/Mesa.

That sounds like you didn't have libtxc_dxtn installed (presuming that was before October 2, 2017 when the S3 pattents expired and libtxc_dxtn was integrated into mesa)

[ALRBP]

That sounds like you didn't have libtxc_dxtn installed (presuming that was before October 2, 2017 when the S3 pattents expired and libtxc_dxtn was integrated into mesa)

Yes, it was before 2017. You are probably right.