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Comment by iseanstevens | Hacker News Reader

Please note that Octoprint and Klipper are at different levels of functionality. It's not a choice between the two in any way.

Octoprint is for job management/monitoring and is SUPER extensible. It gives you a web interface/camera view/manual control of the printer. You can do things like install a slicer plugin so you can drop an .stl file into the browser then it will slice and print.

Klipper is more like printer firmware. It's lower level than Octoprint.

The two can be used together.

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In practice, it is a choice between the two. Klipper based communities tend to stick to Klipper stuff and same with OctoPrint based communities. But yes, dedicated persons can use any combination of firmware + software that they want. It is one of the best parts of the open source 3D printing world!

Interestingly Klipper recommends installing octopi on their website: https://www.klipper3d.org/Installation.html I think some of the comments here are too hard on octoprint, it is still kind of a universal pocket knife for 3d printing.

The klipper3d.org website says you need to install octoprint first and doesn't mention any alternatives.

That's funny. I've been using octoprint with klipper for several years. I've tried to research alternative frontends to octoprint, and there doesn't seem to be a clear winner for klipper. What's the official klipper frontend these days?

https://github.com/fluidd-core/fluidd

What makes that the official UI other than the repo description? What's the deal with mainsail? Both fluidd and mainsail look like the same project. Is there drama? What UI does Kevin O'Connor use?

Has octoprint improved its slicer? From what I remember and accorded to a quick web search [1], the inbuilt slicer has been abandoned. For me, an inbuilt slicker would be worth mixing octoprint and Klipper firmware.

As an aside, I've been using combo of a container running xfce, cura, plus a vnc server and another container running guacamole, all on a proxmox host as a stand in as a web slicer.

1. https://plugins.octoprint.org/plugins/slicer/

I'll add that I prefer mainsail's ui to octoprint, but functionally they're basically equivalent, though I'll cede that Octoprint probably comes out on top as far as integrations. I had my Octoprint instance set so that I could control my 3d printers power relay through Home Assistant. I've yet to figure out how to do that in mainsail.

That plugin isn't an official OctoPrint one. https://github.com/OctoPrint/OctoPrint-Slic3r is what you want.

Why do you need a web slicer? This just seems more work than running PrusaSlicer locally.

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