[sen]

I’ve owned half a dozen printers (Prusa, Bambu, and Creality) and help manage a hackerspace with a print farm of mixed brands, and I won’t personally touch any brand other than Prusa now for actually getting prints done.

There’s plenty of other printers that can do the same or better and/or cheaper if you want “building and managing the printer” to be half the hobby, which is a totally fair thing and can be lots of fun if you’re into tinkering, but for a printer that just prints things as a tool there’s absolutely nothing close to Prusa and they’re worth every cent.

[silversmith]

That used to be the case. Less so now - the Chinese brands tend to work right out of the box.

I run an Elegoo Centauri Carbon ar home, and the building and managing process was unscrewing couple transport bolts and clicking "self calibrate" button. From what I've seen, Creality is the same way now too.

Yes, the old Ender 3 I used to have demanded attention every other print. But it's not the norm now.

I'm sure Prusa makes a better product, and it probably starts to make economic sense if you run a print farm. But for home use, a 300€ box that happily melts plastic into whatever shape I need is a sweet deal. It even has a 50€ multi material extension box now, however that's on months long backorder.

[DoctorOetker]

do these alternatives all share the same pattern of providing cloud services like BambuLabs?

[silversmith]

As far as I know, Elegoo is offline. It has not asked me to log in anywhere, and while it encourages use of their own orcaslicer skin, it works with others too.

[the_af]

I don't know about other brands or even models, but I can attest that the Bambu A1 Mini "just works".

I precisely wanted to avoid another hobby, of which I have too many already. 3D printing as a hobby doesn't appeal to me, I just wanted something that solved the problem and was relatively cheap. The A1 is this for me, it's as close as a fire and forget appliance as I could find.

Not saying there aren't better alternatives, just that it simply works for me.

[VorpalWay]

The A1 mini has turned out to be a fire hazard as of recently. Some component in the power supply that can explode and in the worst case catch fire. Multiple events during the last year, and shockingly it hasn't been recalled. You probably don't want to run yours while not in the room.

[the_af]

Thanks, I'll pay attention. To be honest I never run anything without me in the same room or the next one, so I should be safe.

[_zoltan_]

building and managing a printer is far from a hobby. it's like the Linux desktop people who just fight with their system instead of enjoying MacOS.

[victor_z]

If this isn't trigger bait, I don't know what is.

I don't know the last time you used Linux, but I've used it as my main OS for almost 20 years and have never really felt like I was "fighting" it. My system has always done exactly what I told it to do.

I also used Mac OS and macOS on and off for probably 20 years as well, and it freaking sucks in many ways. _That's_ where I feel like I'm fighting the system. And I grew up with it.

[the_af]

We Linux desktop people aren't fighting our desktop anymore. Everything just works and it has for some years now. Linux with Steam + Proton is a better gaming platform than MacOS, by the way.

The Year of the Linux Desktop arrived a while ago and nobody noticed :)

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Well, you can choose to fight your OS (said with love from a Gentoo and NixOS user). You just don't have to:)

[hju22_-3]

> Everything just works and it has for some years now.

Strange then, that so many people and particularly those who haven't spent years or decades fighting their OS or desktop environment, seem to disagree.

Every time a linux user says "everything just works" there's a massive gotcha. Remove the terminal and try to use a linux system, setting everything up, while properly roleplaying those who haven't spent years to get used to linux's many weird choices and you'll perhaps understand.

[dns_snek]

You can replace "linux" with "windows" in your comment and make the same point.

I've installed Ubuntu and Fedora KDE for less technical relatives and they've used them without issues.

[skeledrew]

> get used to linux's many weird choices

Choices are only weird if there's prior experience with something else with significant enough differences. In this case I still remember the effort it took to switch from Windows to Linux, but I used Zorin OS to make that road smoother.

[the_af]

I mean, I mentioned Steam and Proton, every game works now and you don't have to do anything. What's less "terminal user" than that?

I suggest you try it now, I think you're stuck on outdated knowledge.

[skeledrew]

I've been using Linux for 12 years and never fought it. Before that I had a lot of fights with Windows though, which is why I left it.