Give Laminar Research and Austin Meyer a break. For such a small team, they still did a great job while paying legal fees to fight patent trolls
Its still the best option for OS X or Linux.
Save your energy for Prepar3D devs. These guys bought the MSFSX source code and hired the OG MSFS devs. They are owned by Lockheed Martin, so they don't have any funding excuse. But in a decade they barely innovated, just updating the OG MSFSX game. Until 2006, all MSFS games were completely different from their previous versions, but Prepar3D barely changed.
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Nah. I won't give Austin a break. I would if he didn't spend so much time trying to smack talk his competition, but his arrogance is monumental, so he doesn't get any breaks. And no. He's not doing a great job. X-Plane 12 is an obviously rushed release to try and do *something* (and fail) while MSFS is running away.
The fact that the P3D devs are doing worse doesn't excuse anyone. P3D has never been a commercial simulator intended to be purchased by users. They don't even have the license required for that.
Not sure why everyone is praising MFS2020 so much here, yeah it has nice graphics and clouds but not all systems are perfect and good and it is great to see competition in this field for more innovation.
People are praising MSFS because it's by far the better product, and its superiority nowadays goes far beyond the visuals and extends to basically everything. Fact is that it's a product in which actual resources are being invested, so it's not stuck on technology (and tech doesn't involve just graphics) that was already obsolete in 2015. Most of X-Plane's core tech is prehistoric.
Competition is good only when both competitors can actually compete at a comparable level. This is not competition. It's a beatdown. A product like X-plane, which is purchased only by its most rabid fanboys, simply doesn't have the steam to push MSFS by an inch. MSFS would evolve on its own exactly at the same pace as it is doing even if X-Plane went the way of the dodo tomorrow.
Hell, MSFS just got a default actual airliner that can actually satisfy a serious simmer without having to spend a dime on top of the price of admission, while the much-vaunted A330 X-plane implemented in 12 is ludicrously bad.
The truth is that Microsoft is pushing the genre forward *hard*, while Laminar has contributed to holding it back for a decade.