Rupert S,
With flightgear you have to deal with joysticks on two levels:
- The O/S. On Linux making sure you have the right modules loaded
and working, on Windows installing the joystick as normal.
- Flightgear itself, configuring the joysticks to command the
simulator. For this I recommend that you read the README.Joystick.html
file on the docs/ sub-directory on the flightgear main directory.
As for the graphics, there are quite a few things you can't get on
flightgear, as the developers are (rightly, I think) more interested
in developing the platform and not on the eye-candy to compete
with low-end commercial simulators.
Regards
CS-DNA