I should make my stance clear – I AGREE with Sidney, especially on the grounds of not SELLING a plugin that uses any unofficial manipulation, and generally agree on not using other people’s plugins that do. What I think this post fails to identify is that some people aren’t messing with things because they want a new feature or to have it break later, but because a stop-gap is the only available solution. For context:

We run a commercial simulator company. We LOVE XPlane, it’s by far the best option, and Laminar does a fantastic job maintaining & updating it. For realistic visual flight training, nothing beats it. We’ve tried deploying Windows + XPlane to our offsite setups, and it was a disaster. Not because of Laminar, but because Microsoft is unable to avoid breaking things every second week. Half our setup on Windows is workarounds on top of workarounds, and they don’t usually work. Our Linux + XPlane deployments on the other hand work flawlessly. Linux doesn’t randomly break on us, it’s easily customisable how we need, and on top of that XPlane runs WAY better on Linux – No random stutters, generally higher framerates, etc. Mixed reality is the next step in the journey, and while we’ve had prototypes working with Windows for quite some time, they simply aren’t deployable due to Microsoft. In the meantime, XPlane on Linux for VR works reasonably well (performance is FAR better than on Windows), but is missing quite a lot, like OpenXR support & depth buffers, not to mention even though XPlane is running in Vulkan mode, it’s submitting OpenGL to SteamVR.

So you can see our options:
A) Change simulator for VR
B) Use XRizer + some Vulkan wizardry to make it work in the meantime

To be clear: Laminar has limited time and unlimited things to work on! We don’t expect them to drop everything to make Linux VR fully operational! That being said, I think my point stands that sometimes it’s not that we want to make unsupported things that break, but it’s that we love XPlane and want to use it everywhere we can, even if support for what we need isn’t quite there yet.

Keep up the good work Sidney & Laminar, we can’t wait to keep using XPlane long into the future!

If you decide to use a hack, don’t cry when your stuff breaks. Not even to who created. it will break, as the nature of it. And the most important, don’t buy or run code that was vibecoded without a human looking through it. If any of these “hacks” are not clear that they will break x-plane at any given moment, or break add-ons, it’s a big red flag and no no. And if it is charging you money for that, run to the other side of th room.