You’re in for a treat! I picked it up at launch and loved every second of it. Heat Signature was pretty fun, but the writing and level design in Breach Wizards was just all around top notch.

True, you can have a quality closed source product (look at Bamboo or Stratasys), it’s more lamenting than at one point Prusa was THE open source die hard (and that’s earned them a fair bit of goodwill in a community that generally respects that (on account of only existing because of open source culture)).

Needing to make money is completely valid and understandable, which is what makes this less of an outright outrage and more of an “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” kind of situation.

Agreed, it’s nice to see Prusa put up a modern consumer printer, but for the price I didn’t see anything in the announcement that would make it easier to recommend over the bamboo for the “I need it to just work” folks or the SV08/ voron for the folks that like to tinker (and value not living in a walled garden, Sovol’s hot end/ nozzles not withstanding).

Having just built an LDO 2.4 kit a few months ago, I have no regrets. The 350 kit + printed forward parts weren’t that much more expensive than what this is slated to retail at, but I get a comparatively massive build volume, nerd cred, and the open source nature means that I can tweak, mod, or otherwise upgrade to my hearts content, from being able to run whatever hot end/ extruder I damn well please, to custom parts (hell, I’ve already swapped the tool head mount for Vitalii’s metal one- not quite the COTS ethos of the voron design, but about a thousand times easier line up and tension, worth every penny), or more complicated projects like ERCF or Box Turtle.

Pretty sure quality is it’s own mod that you can run independently of space age, but I could totally be wrong there.

Just to key in on the overlap between FOSS and privacy, because the source code for the software is open, it means that anyone can take a peek at how everything is running under the hood (among other things). It becomes possible to verify that software is storing data locally and properly encrypting when applicable (as opposed to blindly trusting the software’s author and or lawyers).

It may also be a fun fact that best practice in encryption is to open source your algorithms. The helps safeguard against backdoors and mistakes/ errors that could compromise the security of the algorithm. Much for similar reasons as above, as it allows the security community to check your math (in a field where it is incredibly easy to get your math wrong).

I mostly switched for the interface, it feels far more modern and easy to navigate compared to Cura and Prusa (while retaining all but the most bleeding edge features from each). Still not perfect, but I’ve found it to be leagues better at managing and swapping between multiple printers/ nozzles/ materials. It has native calibration tools for everything from temperature towers to flow rates and pressure advance. Plus it plays very nicely with Klipper. I haven’t used it a bunch on account of not being wholly set up for it, but multi color printing is also super easy. It’s kind of dumb, but I appreciate that updates actually update the app instead on installing a new instance (that I’ll have to go uninstall later, looking at you Cura) so that my “send to print utility” button in Fusions always just works. Updates also seem more substantial with meaningful features (things like scarf joints to hide layer lines come to mind), you can very much feel the love that community has poured into it. It’s open source software in all the best ways possible.

I was pretty sold after Teaching Tech’s video last year, but a number of other channels (Lost in Tech comes to mind as well) have also done Orca slicer videos if you’re looking for reasons to give it a try.

Orca is forked from Bambo’s slicer which is in turn forked from prusa slicer.

Same reason most things are funny, or at least mildly amusing: inversion of expectations.