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by themingus 578 days ago
Had to choose between a Prusa and a Bambu Labs for a school 3D printer. Bambu never got back to us when we reached out about tax exemption. That on top of their proprietary aspects sealed the deal for me. Prusa MK4+MMU3 has been more than satisfactory, even with the abuse of high schoolers and their optimistic print aspirations.
2 comments

2D printing is an abomination because everything is proprietary, trash-tier drivers and HP begging for ink subscriptions. I have decided to commit to open source 3D printing. I was thinking of Voron as a next machine but this Prusa looks pretty nice.
What are the proprietary aspects?
BambuLab has a proprietary firmware.

So far, full open source and standard parts have been the standard for consumer-level 3D printer since the RepRap project, and especially for Prusa.

But it is not the case for BambuLab, except for its slicer, but I suspect that's only because it is a derivative of... PrusaSlicer, which is AGPL. Because BambuLab makes great 3D printers and is therefore very successful, the community worries that it will set a precedent and that 3D printing will become more and more locked down.

Mandatory cloud connection for the initial setup (although you can use it in LAN mode afterwards).
as far as I know, you can't flash a different firmware on the printer