[eropple]

I feel for the OctoPrint folks, but you also see Marlin's developer agitating about support, and I think these things are related.

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!)

[sokoloff]

I agree that Klipper is a big part of siphoning off the high-end userbase who was most prone to spend money on their printer parts and ecosystem.

I went Klipper a little reluctantly at first when I built a semi-custom printer and the community seemed to all lean that way. As soon as I “got it”, I switched away from Marlin and Sailfish on my other printers to now be all-Klipper. There’s nothing “wrong” with octoprint per-se, but mainsail is indeed more usable for me in the Klipper ecosystem.

[RowanH]

Some of the latest stuff in the Klipper eco system is mind bendingly awesome. I had a partially built Voron from 3 years ago that I got out of the cupboard a few weeks ago, CAN-Bus print heads, Beacon Eddy-current bed levelling system (that's just insane..), print head acceleration measurement. You can see over the past few years it's been doing what open-source sharing of ideas/code/files has lead to some incredible stuff.

It really seems like Prusa should have done something with Octoprint than trying to reinvent the wheel on their own.

Now Octoprint is left in this shrinking space between Prusa/Bambu and Voron type printers. Bambu from what I can see is the best "click and go option" (albeit going against the open source ethos to a degree) then you go into Voron realm and you're definitely using the Klipper stack there.

When I'd gotten back into it I thought "am I really going to do put this all together, why not go an XL". 3 hours of YouTube videos later it was "no way.. sticking with Voron and going all in..."