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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Macs almost completely for personal and devlopment use about 13 or 14 years ago. However, last year I started a 3d printing side hustle, and got an HP laptop for running the print studio since the amount of hardware I could get for less than $1000 was hard to ignore. However, things like this, and other weird issues (my fonts have gone all wonky a couple of times after random updates) make me want to switch it over to a Linux distro (even though the software support for what I need is much better in the Windows world, and in some cases, better than even on the Mac)

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I have embroidery software and cs3 suite that won't run on linux so I'm planning an offline windows 8.1 just for them on an old computer.

> the software support for what I need is much better in the Windows world

Please elaborate; can you name a few tools and what you use them for? Just curious.

A number of the Autodesk tools and Solidworks, for modeling. Slicers can use APIs native to Windows to perform model repairs. Bambu Lab's farm manager only runs on Windows.

The Creality one runs decent on Mac and Windows, sadly on Linux its a nightmare, and technically why I ditched Ubuntu / popOS for Arch Linux, but I can't help but still feel it runs a little weirder + its out of date compared to Mac and Windows versions. My buddy used to use Orca slicer on my printer, that one iirc should run on Mac too, but I havent tried it.

SuperSlicer, PrusaSlicer and Creality Print work fine for me using Debian. Orca Slicer runs but reliably crashes when opening the preferences window, something which it has been doing for a long time according to the bug report. Cura also works fine om Debian for me. Which problems did you have running any of these?

Does Creality have special changes made to the slicer? If it's just the profilem, then running the PrusaSlicer app image might be the easiest. PrusaSlicer appimage has always worked perfectly on Ubuntu 22 LTS.

I'm probably never going back to Ubuntu. I believe it was crying about me not having the right version of GLIBC, and it just frustrated me.

Bambu (and Orca, etc) runs fine on Windows and Mac. It's the automatic model repair that gives it a leg up on Windows.

Not sure about Autodesk, but have you tried FreeCAD? I own a perpetual SolidWorks license but haven't even activated it. Used it quite lot on another license but I just prefer FreeCAD so much. It does choke on high primitive counts though. Probably has worse FEA (invokes external simulation tools) but that is an assumption, never did FEA. Mostly did parametric CAD, not much technical drawings either, can't say much about that.

For slicers I use PrusaSlicer on Linux (don't have a Prusa; it's really good for generic slicing). But I can see how Bambu stuff could be an issue if it's Win only and not Wineable.

Bambu (and other slicers in the same Prusa Slicer family) runs fine on Windows and Mac. It's the automatic model repair that gives it a leg up on Windows.

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