Hello all, I am considering on getting a 3D printer. I want to print some stuff for a project. I am relatively new to this. I need the slicer software to be compatible (preferably open source) with linux since that’s what I am using. I have only found the stuff from Prusa to be compatible but they are expensive. I have heard of ender 3 but it is the only os printer by creality and saw the repo is 3yo without updates.

Can I get some suggestions?

  • sylver_dragonEnglish
    4•2 months ago

    I currently do all of my 3d printing from Linux. My printer is physically connected to my server, which is running Ubuntu and has a docker container running Octoprint. The container is based on Debian. The printer itself is a crappy knock-off of the Ender 3. The only issue was identifying the port I needed to pass through to the container… And by “issue”, I mean I had to run ls -l /dev/serial/by-id and put the resulting device in the devices declaration of my docker-compose.yaml file.

    My main machine is Arch and I use Prusa Slicer as an Appimage. The only issue there is that Prusa Slicer likes to SegFault while slicing some models with some settings on my system. It’s not common, but it does happen. I think this is related to the Nvidia drivers; but, by using the Appimage it’s just the application which crashes and I can’t be arsed to spend the time to solve the issue. I also tried Cura, but ran into this bug (tl;dr: don’t use Nvidia on Linux). Overall though, it just works and I don’t really think about the fact that I’m on Linux.

    For modeling, I personally use OpenScad, as I have all the artistic capabilities of a mortally wounded water buffalo. One of these days, I’ll pretend to try to learn FreeCad, which runs just fine. Blender also runs great on Linux.

    In short, so long as you aren’t buying anything too proprietary, you should be just fine.