| Having the courage to talk about this frankly and show a little bit of data in support is very compelling. It has resulted in at least one new monthly contributor and hope others do the same. I wonder if the decline in donations has anything to do with Prusa refusing to properly support Octoprint in favor of their own half baked, awful competitors that are no doubt in furtherance of their quest for SaaS rent seeking (BambuLabs fear? jealousy?). The MK4 and XL are barely functional with Octoprint and Prusa has indicated they intend to keep them this way, as they did with the Mini. That's a large and growing market now not really supported by Octoprint. They instead want you to use Prusa Connect, their currently free farm management software that requires internet access and all of your data to manage your local network of machines. No doubt this goes non-free the second any momentum is achieved. I say 'want you to use' because their local network solution, PrusaLink, is a barely maintained skeleton of a project that replicates a tiny portion of Octoprint's functionality, poorly (4kb/s uploads! 27 char file name limits!), while missing many critical features, has no plugin support and many many bugs. No doubt the prioritization within Prusa is Cloud and not the local functionality you actually need and your machines are capable of. By reducing Octoprint functionality to the level of their own rudimentary offerings on their newest flagship printers they certainly make the case for using Octoprint far less compelling and paying for it even less so. Octofarm shutting down also probably didn't help things either. |
Even if you set aside Bambu and Prusa (who yeah, they use Marlin, but their fork is Theirs and they make little effort to contribute back), it's hard not to think that Klipper has developed better options than both Marlin and OctoPrint internally. And, from where I sit, it seems that the leading edge--the sort of folks who are likely to go spring for a SBC to drive their printers--are moving towards a Klipper-based stack at a nontrivial pace. The original reason I went to Klipper wasn't for speed or input shaping or anything like that--it was first for online printer config but a close second was Mainsail. Mainsail just works better than Octoprint - it handles multiple printers better because of how it's decoupled from Moonraker (Klipper's API layer), it's a nicer interface, and of course it gets comfortable with things like Klipper's printer.conf editing, too.
I can't speak to the Prusa stuff, I don't own any of their printers, but the Bambu experience inside the slicer is...actually pretty good, too. They figured out some good stuff. I'm pretty happy with my Klipper setups alongside my Bambu printers (though Bambu-the-company seems to come with some really loaded downsides, and that is a frustrating thing), and I just don't see a reason to use OctoPrint ever again.
(Now, the large manufacturers taking Klipper and not even upstreaming changes back--that is a hill I'll gladly charge, it's real gross!)