I finally got a new laptop and was able to move away from FSX. I started flying a sim with the MS2004 "A Century of Flight", a heck of a classic! Impossible not to like that sim so much. I'm liking X-Plane 12 quite a lot. I took some time to decide between it and MSFS2024, but decided for X-Plane 12 for its focus on physics. It seems a lot people prefer MSFS' focus on scenery quality, and I can understand why, but if have to give up on some scenery quality to have more realistics physics, that's what I would go for and that's what I went for.

I was expecting to be able to use the same or similar kayboard and mouse assignments that I used on FSX and nearly all of them are possible. I miss some extra camera flexibility from FSX, like easy zoom in and zoom out, focal length change; these things were easier on FSX, but what's possible to do on X-Plane 12 is not too bad. Other than that, I'm very pleased with it. I've experienced physics effects I hadn't before, and that's very cool. The flight experience looks and feels more realistic. I missed proper suspension and sinking behavior upon landing (for instante), and that absent or artificial on FSX. I didn't even saw them being well represented on MSFS2024, which is quite disappointing. These effects work very close to real on X-Plane as they should. In the future I'll buy a cool flight control to make it even more fun, probably a flght yoke.

If your focus is physics, don't think twice.

This simulator is amazing with so many things, with physics, realism, and training purposes. If you are looking for a simulator to train for your PPL or something more this simulator is perfect. However, if you are looking for a casual flying experience this simulator is not for you, the default scenery is amazing for all airports. However if you are looking for scenery on par with MSFS you will need to spend 40-50$ on mods alone.

I tried out XP12 as someone with several hundred hours on MSFS, mostly out of curiosity for how it would stack up. Overall I was pretty disappointed, and found it much less user friendly than MSFS.

The controls are not great. Is a "toggle internal/external" keybind really that hard to include in a $60 sim? Same with combination button controls for controllers/joysticks--why are only keyboards allowed that advanced feature?

The FMS/GPS on the couple included planes I tried also didn't impress me. More barebones than MSFS.

No camera presets? Really? And why can't I zoom the view out further?

Yes this is all whining over small stuff, but it adds up and just feels like a clunkier version of MSFS.

People claim the flight model blows MSFS out of the water, but I didn't notice enough difference to stick around and put up with the jank. No, I'm not going to spend hours tweaking plugins and running out the refund clock to make your sim usable.