Comment by bdcravens
6 hours ago
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)
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.
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.
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technically why I ditched Ubuntu / popOS for Arch Linux, but I can't help but still feel it runs a little weirder + its out of date compared to Mac and Windows versions.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.
1 reply →
So sayeth the sea lion
Not the person you replied to, but I’ll go. Try experimenting with ham radio on anything but Windows. As far as I can tell, they revoke your Apple developer’s license and confiscate your Linux install disks when you start selling radio hardware.
That’s not completely true. There’s good Linux and Mac software for lots of things. But approximately 100% of radio manufacturers ship Windows software. Far fewer support anything else.
I bought a new radio at Christmas. Before buying it, I ruled out alternatives that didn’t have 1st party or good 3rd party support. It’s like trying to buy a scanner in 2003.