The initial Decision!

I've been using flight simulators since 1997, when I took my first PC. I've tried all versions of MS Flight Simulator (since MSFS 5), Fly 2, X-Plane (since 7.xx), Flightgear and more.... Until lately, I was stuck to MS FS. I knew that as far as flight dynamics are concerned FS hasn't much to deliver (especially in comparison to x-plane) but several very good payware add-ons (F1 ATR, Maddog, LVLD 767) saved the game!

Progressively, as my experience over computers and my demands from the grew up, I was more and more facing the disadvantages of Windows: registry fragmentation, slow response even in brand new machines, higher and higher demand on hardware (and money), safety issues..... All theese led me to Linux!

I finally took the deceision to completely move to Ubuntu Linux on February 2008 and untill then Linux is my main OS. I only retained a partition with Windows XP in order to be able to ran MS FS.

However, this reduced my fun from flight simulation, because each time I would like to make a flight I had to reboot to Windows, start FS, setup my controllers etc. If, for any reason, I had to abort the flight and do something else with my pc, I had to reboot back to Ubuntu and do my job! Very boring situations that eventually led me to stop flying!

At that point I started again to look at X-Plane. V 9.2 was out at that time, with superior graphics, very nice scenery, wonderful 3D objects and -of course- the "traditional" superior x-plane physics emulation! Furthermore, X-Plane runs natively on Linux, what means that I finally could fly a serious flight simulator without the rebooting process!

I stopped thinking and grabed a copy! That's it!