Haven’t heard much about that yet, indeed also sounds bad. But it’s anycubic so who cares :p.
But yeah, it’s indeed not the best trend. But it also up to open source to actually compete with this, and not just chase shiny features, but also usability…
Just wondering, is this “trend” you’re talking about just the Bambulab situation, or are other manufacturers doing the same? I’m not super up to date on 3d printing news, so not sure if i missed more such changes.
If it’s the bambulab situation, it’s not entirely unexpected. When they started people were already worried about exactly this seeing how closed their ecosystem is. Then again, they did make a printer that just works better than the competition, and that’s in the end what attracts users.
Personally i have diy 3d printers that i built myself, really happy with them, but for people who just want to print things, many other filament printers are just too annoying to work with. Not everyone is into diy, and many people just want to make cool stuff and not care about the printer, and bambulab really made the next step towards achieving that.
So if the open source community wants to compete with that, they must make printers that are as user friendly. My diy 3d printers are like running linux. Really great and customizable if you like to work on 3d printers, and really reliable now i as an expert built & tuned them. But most people just want to buy a machine that works, and that’s not these open source printers. And as long as we just focus on making 3d printers for expert diy’ers, we’ll end up in the same place as linux is for OS’es: used by experts and for specific advanced usecases, but beyond reach for the common user that’s then stuck on systems like apple/windows that are more locked down, but actually just work without having to understand how the entire thing works.
I get that the lemmings here are enthousiastic about linux, but even as a developer, every time i work with linux, i end up facing the most annoying user hostile problems >_<…
Since this is gaming related, and i just faced one today: I bought a Legion Go (steamdeck like device), and put bazzite on it (steamos like os). And was trying to run visual pinball on it, which actually has a linux build. Try to run the linux build: shared library libbz2.so.1.0 not found… Google around a bit: a yes, because that’s a fedora distro, unlike most other distros, they named it libbz2.so.1 . But many apps assume libbz2.so.1.0 also exists so try to use that. Fair enough, i’ll add a link with that name. Ah yes, this is a distro with a readonly filesystem. Lucklily as a dev i realized i can probably put the link in the folder of the program itself, and that indeed worked.
But ffs linux world, why do you fuck up such basic things like just agreeing on how you name basic shared dll’s (googling for it i found people struggling with this when using python, so it’s not something that rarely happens)…
I love the control linux offers, and got NAS and a little server running linux, and for the handheld it’ll probably give me more battery life or performance too, so linux for sure has some benefits.
But if you have to be an expert just to get things f’ing made for linux to run due to stupid stuff like this… whyyyyyy???