Unfortunately proprietary professional software suites are still usually better than their FOSS counterparts. For instance Altium Designer vs KiCAD for ECAD, and Solidworks vs FreeCAD. That’s not to say the open source tools are bad. I use them myself all the time. But the proprietary tools usually are more robust (for instance, it is fairly easy to break models in FreeCAD if you aren’t careful) and have better workflows for creating really complex designs.

I’ll also add that Lightroom is still better than Darktable and RawTherapee for me. Both of the open source options are still good, but Lightroom has better denoising in my experience. It also is better at supporting new cameras and lenses compared to the open source options.

With time I’m sure the open source solutions will improve and catch up to the proprietary ones. KiCAD and FreeCAD are already good enough for my needs, but that may not have been true if I were working on very complex projects.

Cute cat! Nevermore and Bentobox are two super popular ones.

Since you’re running an E3 V2, first make sure you’ve replaced the hotend with an all-metal design. The stock hotend has the PTFE tube routed all the way into the hotend, which is fine for low temp materials like PLA, but can result in off-gassing at higher temperatures such as those used by ASA and some variants of PETG. The PTFE particles are almost certainly not good to breathe in during the long term, and can even be deadly to certain animals such as birds at small quantities.

In my experience doing a bit more than 10% can be helpful in the event of underextrusion, plus I’ve seen it add a bit more rigidity. But you’re right that there are diminishing returns till you start maxing out the infill.

4 perimeters at 0.6mm or 6 at 0.4 should be fine.

Yeah, I agree. In the photo I didn’t see an enclosure so I said PETG is fine for this application. With an enclosure you’d really want to use ABS/ASA, though PETG could work in a pinch.

I also agree that an enclosure (combined with a filter) is a good idea. I think people tend to undersell the potential dangers from 3D printing, especially for people with animals in the home.

All good, it’s still something to keep in mind (especially if OP thinks about enclosing their printer in the future). Thanks for your comment!

IMO heat formed from stress will not be a big deal, especially considering that people frequently build machines out of PETG (Prusa’s i3 variants, custom CoreXYs like Vorons and E3NG). The bigger problem is creep, which suggests that you shouldn’t use PLA for this part.

PETG will almost certainly be fine. Just use lots of walls (6 walls, maybe 30% infill). PETG’s heat resistance is more than good enough for a non-enclosed printer. Prusa has used PETG for their printer parts for a very long time without issues.

Heat isn’t the issue to worry about IMO. The bigger issue is creep/cold flowing, which is permanent deformation that results even from relatively light, sustained loads. PLA has very poor creep resistance unless annealed, but PETG is a quite a bit better. ABS/ASA would be even better but they’re much more of a headache to print.

IIRC BOTW was built on MonolithSoft’s engine (the devs behind Xenoblade) so in fairness, those games are more-so the same exception rather than the rule. That said, even without the comparison, GameFreak clearly did not properly optimize the Pokemon games on switch, with stuff like loading the whole map’s ocean at any given time.

It really depends on what you’re looking for. Are you just looking to learn how to print new materials, or do you have specific requirements for a project?

If it’s the former, I’d say the easiest thing to try is PETG. It prints pretty reasonably on most printers though has stringing issues. It has different mechanical properties that make it suitable for other applications (for example, better temperature resistance and impact strength). It’ll be much less frustrating than trying to dial in ABS for the first time.

ABS and TPU are both a pretty large step up in difficulty, but are quite good for functional parts. If you insist on learning one of these, pick whichever one fits with your projects better. For ABS you’ll want an enclosure and a well ventilated room (IMO I wouldn’t be in the same room as the printer) as it emits harmful chemicals during printing.

I’m glad to hear yours have been holding up! Maybe my friends and I were just particularly unlucky.

The service manuals are available direct from Dell. For all the laptop’s faults in my experience, I do appreciate that the SSDs are socketed, as are the RAM sticks on the 15. I do also appreciate that Dell sells replacement batteries (and they aren’t glued in either!) as that’s usually the first part to need a swap.

I haven’t used the XPS 13 personally but my experience and all my friends’ experience with the XPS lineup is that despite their build quality, they’re quite prone to failure. On my 15, the keyboard failed multiple times, as well as one of the fans and eventually one thunderbolt port, all within a span of 4 years.

They’re beautiful machines that really should be quality, but in practice for some reason they haven’t lasted for me. On the plus side though, Dell does at least offer service manuals, and lots of parts can be replaced by a user (on the 15 you can easily replace fans, RAM, SSDs, and with some work you can replace the top deck, display, and SD reader).

A filament dryer was honestly the single biggest improvement to my printer’s quality. I’d definitely recommend getting one. Wet filament is so frustrating to print.

I suspect this is an Akonadi issue as I have the same problem with Merkuro Calendar. My Nextcloud account (configured via CalDAV and CardDAV endpoints) also disables itself if my network gets signed out, which is mildly annoying. Not sure if there’s an easy fix.

He’s apparently said he was born in 1988. In another thread others mentioned that would make him 21 when he started his PhD, which checks out.

Not that unusual IMO, lots of people start their PhD directly after completing their Bachelor’s. If they weren’t born born in the first half of the year then they’ll have completed their BS by 21 and start the PhD either at 21 or 22.

KStars

I’ll add that KStars has a really powerful astrophotography suite called Ekos. It has lots of helpful automation features to make imaging relatively simple to setup.

I’ve tried Overture, Creality, and Inland (all black though, not transparent) and Overture printed the best for me (at least for functional parts where I cared about print quality and tolerances). Inland’s PETG+ and High Speed PETG was even better though.

What I do have an issue with is new users that try and have problems and immediately start whinging that “FreeCAD isn’t like what I know. And it needs to be like my favorite” Those are the lazy people that can’t be bothered to learn something new. And they should either expend the effort to learn or go back to whatever they were using

I think that’s fair, but most criticisms of FreeCAD from people coming from other CAD packages rather fall into your latter category that you mention here:

But if you have given FreeCAD, (or ANYTHING new in life), an honest try and you can’t get the hang of it or simply don’t like it.

I don’t think we’re actually disagreeing in principle, just on what we perceive as the common criticisms of FreeCAD. Normally, I’ve seen people from other CAD programs get frustrated at limitations within FreeCAD or needing to work around bugs in ways that slow them down. For example, FreeCAD previously was unable to cope with multiple geometries being contained in a single sketch (I believe 1.0 now supports multiple extrudes from different sketch regions, but previously FreeCAD would throw an error), which made modeling less efficient for those coming from programs like Solidworks where this feature exists. Throw other issues like toponaming into the mix and it’s no surprise people from other CAD programs tried learning it, got frustrated (since their baseline was better than what FreeCAD could offer) and moved on.

I agree that criticizing FreeCAD for having different workflows than other CAD programs is a bit silly, though. I don’t really care what the exact workflow is as long as it 1) works and 2) is fast, and for me FreeCAD 1.0 (and previously Realthunder’s branch) ticks all the boxes there.

I appreciate the respectful discussion!

I do think the point about all CAD packages having failure paths is a little overblown. Yes, you can definitely get proprietary CAD to break but in my experience (at least with Solidworks and Fusion), it usually requires much more complex parts than FreeCAD parts. Post 1.0 the situation is definitely better though.

You’re right that users should try following best practices from day one, but realistically most users are not going to learn everything correctly automatically. They might use an out of date tutorial, or might have just learned by tinkering themselves.

The point I was trying to make was that because FreeCAD operates differently than other CAD programs do to one another and because it’s generally a bit more brittle and demanding of the user, I can’t say I blame anyone for not wanting to switch to it if they already have a CAD program they’re proficient with. You could call it being lazy, but from a practical standpoint there isn’t necessarily a ton to gain for a relatively large amount of time investment required to be capable of using it.

I really hope FreeCAD improves enough one day in the new user experience department. I love the software and have been using it as my tool of choice for years now, but evidently not everyone thinks it’s worth the time investment.

I’ll mention this fix is aimed at mitigating toponaming primarily for sketch attachment. Some features still struggle with toponaming, namely chamfers and fillets. But in any case, it’s a massive step forward and makes FreeCAD much easier to recommend! Until now I’ve been using Realthunder’s fork since toponaming was such a headache to resolve manually.