amusingly, the people now telling others to switch from Windows to Linux for some "geeky reasons" are the exact same ones who complain about others being "geeks" when talking to them about their way of using FG or using FG internals like Nasal.
I am a Linux user myself, so I have no agenda here. But these double standards are kinda funny... especially because folks like Jabberwocky keep complaining that FG, as a project and community, would be so unfriendly to end-users and that we should grow a community of end-users who may become "contributors" at some point - without realizing that requiring/suggesting a switch to different OS may very well contribute to alienating newcomers, unnecessarily so:
FlightGear is a piece of cross-platform software, and the more platforms/use-cases it supports, the better its code base will become over time.Equally, it is generally not a good idea to tell others to switch away from Intel or ATI/AMD hardware to Nvidia graphics cards for the same reasons - seriously: all of you are getting to shape the way FlightGear will work 5+ years from now to varying degrees (depending on your own involvement) - no matter if that means OS/platform support, 32 bit support, CPU/RAM requirements or VRAM/GPUs/graphics cards.
There are a few users wanting to run FlightGear on mobile devices or gaming consoles - others want to use it for UAV stuff, and even others want to run it in "headless" mode, without displaying any graphics at all (certainly not Rembrandt/ALS or other effect/shader stuff) - all of those are valid use-cases, as is running FlightGear on an outdated OS, including even on 10-year old hardware with a nvidia 7600 GPU - ideally, FlightGear should "just work", using what's available - analogous to installing a modern Linux 3.0 distro on a 586 PC with 133 mhz and 32 mb of RAM - give it a try, it actually works reasonably well
And then we have people like home cockpit builders wanting to use FG just for visuals, without wanting to run any Nasal at all, ideally getting rock-solid >= 60 hz/fps.
Admittedly, FlightGear isn't quite there yet - but things like the "minimal startup profile" already demonstrate that it is feasible to provide a "safe mode" when booting FlightGear, and incrementally raise system requirements along the line - not unlike your OS "booting" (POST, BIOS, real mode, protected mode etc).
Whenever
we tell people to abandon some OS/platform/hardware or use-case in favor of a better-supported alternative, we're also weakening FlightGear as an open source project. The number of Windows-based contributors (especially core developers) is already surpringly small, and we should embrace anybody wanting to use FG on such platforms, especially if that means helping with testing - as that will help those few actually developing on Windows.
FlightGear already tends to attract more geeks than end-users - even people with a strong background in flight simulation and aviation are unlikely to be really interested in FG, unless they also happen to have a "tinkerer's mentality" and ideally some background in Unix/Linux or software development/open source in general.
The FlightGear project could be in a much better shape by having more Windows-based contributors, which even includes outdated versions of Windows.
As a communtiy we're doing a disservices to ourselves by expecting people to have the background of CS gradudates to install and configuure, let alone use/fly FG.