 Alright, so if you watch my channel, you know that I champion Libre, freedom-respecting, free-and-open-source software. You know, stuff like Gimp, Audacity, OBS, Blender, I've made videos on all of these. But one thing I've never really made a video about is an open-source game. And there are a few, there's many of which that you may have heard of from other certain specific major YouTubers who talk about open-source games. But there is one that I've never really seen mentioned on any major Linux channel. At least not until now. Flight Gear, the flight simulator that is entirely open-source. Down to every single airplane model, all the textures, even the data for the world's geography. They get it from OpenStreetMaps, which as you well know is an open-source Libre initiative to map the entire world's geography. Now for some background, the first video game I ever played as a kid was Microsoft Flight Simulator X on my dad's Windows Vista computer. I absolutely adored the thing and I played it way too much probably. Now this means that I have experience with many competitors to Flight Gear. Or, you know, just other flight simulators in general, like Microsoft Flight Simulator X, Prepared 3D, and of course X-Plane 11. So I have an idea of what to expect from Flight Gear. And the first big thing with Flight Gear is that it is very technical. Now installing Flight Gear is relatively easy. It's available in all major OSs like Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and even FreeBSD. However, please do note that if you are on Arch Linux, like me, then you're going to have to compile the entire game and its data pack from source. Now if you make the rookie mistake of opening Flight Gear expecting for it to actually work, then you'll be surprised by this gigantic infinite OSHA that your plane is somehow standing on. That's right, you haven't downloaded any scenery yet. Luckily it's pretty easy to do. All you have to do is go into the launcher settings or give this as a launch flag for the program and just type dash dash enable dash terracic. Terrasync is a service that lets you download scenery on the fly in Flight Gear. It will just begin downloading OpenStreetMap data so it fills in the world around you with lots of interesting things, including airports and runways. Now once you've gotten your terracing working, you'll notice there's a few other things that are sort of missing in Flight Gear. First of all, there are no aircraft yet. Well, there's one aircraft. There's a Cessna 172B, the most popular aircraft ever actually, but you have to go into the hangar settings in the plugin section of the launcher. And there you can enable the official Flight Gear hangar. And once enabled, you can go to your aircraft tab and you can browse all the aircraft that are available in the official Flight Gear hangar. And let's be honest, there are quite a few here. There's all the major airliners that I can think of. There's a few oldies. There's a few new aircraft and lots of interesting things in between, like whatever this is. Now, of course, there are plenty of other King's and technical things that you might want to tweak before you start flying. But for the most part, once you've got your plane, your scenery, and you have some basic understanding of aerodynamics, you can just start flying right then and there. By the way, did I mention that Flight Gear has its own map built into the simulator that has open street map support and its own web server that you can use to track your flight in real time in a web browser? Now, after spending three hours downloading and setting up Flight Gear, you may come to an important realization about your installation process. Wow, I am so lonely. But don't fret, because Flight Gear has a massive multiplayer online server. That's right. You can connect to one of many federated servers that make up the entire world. And you can then fly from any destination to any other destination. And you can go to this website and see where every single Flight Gear pilot on the server is at this very moment. Not only that, but Flight Gear has a massive community constantly making new aircraft, new scenery, new liveries, you name it. And just like Flight Gear itself, all of these are open source and permissively licensed. I looked everywhere and I couldn't find a single piece of Flight Gear Payware. And for the people who aren't willing to dish out thousands of dollars for a flight simulator setup, you'll be happy to know that Flight Gear runs relatively well, even on older and slower hardware. In conclusion, Flight Gear is like the Linux of flight simulators. Yeah, it's fast, it's free, it's open source, it's all customizable, all that good stuff. However, at the same time, you sort of have to tweak it a little bit to get it exactly how you want it. And something is made just break for no reason sometimes, although the solution is mostly just a single Google or DuckDuckGo search away. But honestly, considering its scope, the amount of content available, all the multiplayer stuff, and just the functionality it offers, Flight Gear is probably the single best open source game. Even something like MindTest, which is basically just open source Minecraft. Yeah, sure, it has a lot of content and stuff available for it. But it's far too new, and it's not been around enough to have the sort of legacy, support, and fascinating community that Flight Gear has. So yeah, I've been Denshi. I hope you enjoyed this video on Flight Gear. Have a safe flight.