DCS has 2 free planes and there's good free mods, it's military oriented but nothing stops you from just flying around More on reddit.com

FlightGear is probably your best bet, graphically it's a bit behind now, but it's free, open-source and all addons are free, including some fairly detailed aircraft. More on reddit.com

Flight simulators are great... I've utilized MSFS2020 at time to help knock off the IFR rust by flying a practice approach. Having said that, PPL is about the fundamentals of pilotage which just can't be adequately replicated in a home simulator. You lack the physical sensations sitting in an office chair as well as your peripheral vision... which most commonly translates to new pilots developing bad habits of relying on their instruments more than the visual and physical senses needed for VFR flight. There's also the costs associated with the high end PC, game, and associated flight controls needed to get any benefit out of the current generation of flight sim games... all of that is money you could better put into aircraft rental hours, a good headset, a Foreflight membership, etc. More on reddit.com

Wish I could fairly answer, but never looked back once I was able to sim on PC again lol. I really enjoyed RFS back when I played it, it offered the most fun overall simming experience, with lots of aircraft to choose from. I moved onto XP Mobile from there, and was hooked on it because of the accuracy compared to RFS, but there were too many problems with crashes. Maybe because I was on android, dunno'. I want to say though, it's super duper hyper ultra omega (insert extreme adjective of choice) to compare RFS, or any mobile, scenery to MSFS. For what it offers, I think it's quite nice. That said, either Aerofly or Infinite Flight seemed to be the prettiest I tried. More on reddit.com