Boxflat - Moza Racing controls in Linux
Gaming on Linux has come a long way, and mainly due to Valve and more specifically, Proton, the last couple of years have seen Linux gaming make a massive leap forward.
One genre of gaming is sim racing, which has also seen a rise in popularity in recent years and one of the big names in terms of sim racing hardware is Moza Racing.
Moza Racing sell a range of sim racing hardware like steering wheels, direct drive wheelbases, pedal sets and more recently, flight simulation hardware.
Moza does not provide official support for Linux, but their hardware has kernel-level support in Linux thanks to the amazing efforts by JacKeTUs on GitHub. He created drivers for Moza products as well as a whole host of other hardware, and had them upstreamed to the Linux kernel.
Boxflat
One issue, though, with having kernel-level support is that making adjustments can be problematic if the relevant hardware manufacturer doesn't have an app to allow for setting changes.
Boxflat is a Linux app that's being developed by Lawstorant that provides similar levels of control to the official PitHouse Windows app from Moza. We used it recently to get our Moza R9 V2 wheelbase configured, and it worked amazingly well.
Installing Boxflat was easy thanks to Flatpak support and it also being on the Arch AUR. After installation, the main controls we needed were wheel rotation and force feedback strength. If these two are way off, out-of-the-box, then games can be essentially unplayable. Boxflat solved this issue as well as allowed for various other small changes like wheel speed and wheel spring/damper settings.
Final thoughts
Boxflat gives us almost everything that the Moza Pithouse app provides except for firmware upgrades. The developer is working on it, but suggests that users use Pithouse for firmware upgrades until they confirm that Boxflat has proper support for it.
There have been quite a few stumbling blocks that prevented us from switching from Windows to Linux in terms of sim racing. Anti-cheat support, GPU driver issues, peripheral support and stability being the main things that broke our speed. Boxflat is just one more tool that makes Linux a genuinely viable alternative to Windows.
