As the author of the Logitech G920 driver, I'm probably one of the more qualified to answer your question. First of all, I assume you're looking for a force feedback wheel. In that case, which is a bit of a long story.

Technically the force feedback system in the Linux kernel is equal to that of Windows. However, there are only two drivers that fully support it: the old iforce wheel and the new Logitech G920. The other Logitech wheels only have partial support in the mainline kernel. Partial support is enough for GRID Autosport, but not enough for ETS2/ATS. However, we do have an experimental driver with full support for the rest of the Logitech wheels, but it may not be 100% stable.

I've never had a direct report from anybody, but as far as I know there is no force feedback support for Fanatec or any other brand of wheels yet. Were still looking for an adventurous owner to help us reverse engineer the thing.

There's another "little" caveat. There are still bugs in the FF code in ETS2 and ATS that makes the force feedback feeling a bit unbalanced. (read, some force are waaaay too strong) It's still better than no FF though. I'll prod the devs again soon.

So as to what is best, Logitech if you want support today. Not sure if you can get that for 250 Euro though.

As for your other stuff. Wheels are completely unusable for something like X-Plane. Hardware good for X-Plane is actually pretty damn expensive. Watch out for Saitek stuff. It may look "cheap", but it's also really bad. Especially the yokes. The HOTAS systems are better, but they come with the well know Saitek build quality problems. The most reliable thing for me so far is the Thrustmaster T.16000M joystick, which is actually quite cheap. I'm still suffering through a set of Saitek pedals though. Anything good (if you want to fly helicopters for instance) will set you back 350 Euro. Good yokes will set you back closer to a thousand. Ouch. Did anybody mention that a flight sim hobby is expensive?

A head tracker is great. But since TrackIR won't support Linux, I built one myself. Not nearly as good, but much cheaper.

@Ehvis

Thanks for the detailed answer.

The Logitech G920 cost about €280,- by Amazon. Thats ok for me. But there are some bad comments about the G920 mostly because of the pedals.

I looked up the Thrustmaster T.160000M (€55,-). Could be good for X4 too. I don't plan to make a hobby from X-Plane, just want to fly around a little. Maybe when I'm retire but thats in about 17 years:)

Good to know that the Saitek stuff is not worth a buy.

Locking around in the joystick lists by amazon I cam across the Thrustmaster Hotas Warthog, looks cool but much to expensive.

What about the G29? Its about €265,- and I could use it with my playstation 3 (if i ever like to play Grand something 5 again.) But I guess the FF is not full supported.


PS:
If you need help in some way with the driver development or other things around Linux please let me know. (I'm a SW developer Linux,C/C++)

The G920 (and the G29) have rather stiff brake pedals. Good for racing, bad for trucking.

The G29 is pretty much the same as the G920, but with more buttons, which is good for ETS2. But you'll need the experimental drivers (see here for that if you want to do ETS2.

Note that the G920 and G29 don't come with an H-shifter, so you need to get one separately if you want that.

A warthog is much better indeed, but very expensive. I got the T16000 for 40 EUR, so shop around a bit.

As for development in Linux. I picked something that bugged me (lack of FF support), contacted a few people and suddenly I was doing drivers ;-)

Just wand to give an update.

Two things happen.

First, a few days ago I bought the G29 (€254,-). After a while of thinking which wheel I should buy I bought the G29 for 2 reasons. 1st, I still have a PS3 and 2nd I'm not sure but I guess that Logitec has to pay some money to MS and Sony and if that's the case I don't want to give money to MS (bad enough that MS gets money from Android sails).

The 2nd thing I did last weekend, I swished from Linux Mint 18 to Arch Linux. Took a while to install but that's most because I made it as complicated I could do, installing it from within Linux Mint and not by booting the live CD.

However, the G29 runs out of the box. No need for a driver to install. Maybe that's because Arch installed the 4.8.7 kernel? There was only one thing to do to get GRID Autosport using the wheel, I had to switch the driver into the G27 mode (the wheel is just to new for this game.)

Euro Truck Simulator 2 is working too, but so far the force feedback does not work but its still much better then keyboard and mouse.

Thanks for the good advise,
Dax

Force feedback for ETS2 requires experimental drivers. I do maintain a package on a steam group (as mentioned above), but they may not be stable. I do take feedback and try to fix things though.

I do not go to talk about wheels. I see that you tried to use Steam Controller in ETS2. The support of Steam Controller for this game is ugly. Basically you can configure it like a keyboard + mouse. You can use the analog stick like a wheel, but if you pull it right or left, it's like you press a keyboard button.

I found a solution to play this game with Steam Controller. I use SC-Controller (https://github.com/kozec/sc-controller) and configure it like emulated XBOX360 controller with High precission camera. You need to run sc-controller and select this profile before start Steam. When you run the game, you can configure the controls like XBOX360 and the right pad works like a mouse to move the camera.

I recently bought a G29 at a Black Friday sale, the shop also had the G920 at the same price but I thought I made the better choice as it is suppose to have official support already in the 4.4 kernel, but turns out force feedback doesn't work for ETS2 (which is the main reason I bought the wheel for).

If only I knew of Ehvis' driver I would have purchased the G920 instead :(

@Ehvis, I'm having trouble trying to get the experimental driver to work, and posted a query on the Steam forum, appreciate if you can have a look and see what I'm doing wrong, really want to get my G29 working for ETS2/ATS.

P.S - I can't find any reference but I assume the G29 should be in PS3 mode for Linux, or is it PS4?

Thank you for all your hard work Ehvis! I recently got a G920 and have been happily trucking in ETS2, the wheel & drivers work well. Right now it wasn't quite plug and play on Ubuntu Trusty (and I assume it isn't yet on the latest LTS either since the kernel is 4.4).


Had to compile a kernel (the first version with the driver looks to be 4.5) with the driver & add configuration for getting the wheel into PC mode for USB modeswitch. I mention this for the benefit of others who want to get one since I felt the information on it was a little scattered.

After that it's been working well and I'm sure in a newer distro than those I won't have to do anything besides plugging it in. I guess the package Ehvis provides would be another option but going with a new kernel ought to work on just about any distro.

Hi Ehvis,

I'm going to be putting together a driving simulator which I would run on Linux. I ran across your driver for the G920 wheel and I thought it might be exactly what I need. I'm brand new to trying to use joysticks / wheels on Linux so I had a couple of questions before I put the money out for the G920.

1. What type of device does the G920 show up as? /dev/input/js#?

2. What types of events could I expect to get from the G920? I tried reading through hid-logitech-hidpp.c, but I couldn't piece that together. Could you perhaps point me to a resource or give a short example?

Thanks for any assistance.

1. Both as /dev/input/js# and /dev/input/event#. You can only use force feedback through /dev/input/event# though.

2. That driver only covers the force feedback part, which is completely separate from the events. Install "evtest" and you can see all events that are sent.