Take a step back. What users want is to be able to use the machine they bought the way they want. The outrage is because Bambu are doing a bait-and-switch: selling an autonomous 3D printer, but switching to a 3D printing service. Enshittification pure and simple.

This sounds really unpleasant to use. Maybe users just want a better UX for the local mode?

I don’t mind the sd card thing, also happy with my bottom of the barrel ender 3.

I get it. The convenience of networking - when it works FOR the customer - is great.

But networking controlled by corporations is a path to enshittification.

There are many reasons one might prefer OrcaSlicer over Bambu Studio. One might be perfectly fine using Bambu's cloud services while preferring OrcaSlicer for different reasons; this is for those people.

Others might not want to use Bambu's cloud services at all; OrcaSlicer as it currently exists is fine for them.

it's been going on since the fucking cloud-into-everything fad started ~15 years ago

FULU Foundation is a right to repair group, which explains their interest in this. I, for one, support them. https://www.fulu.org/our-story

I agree with your point about git history, though. https://github.com/FULU-Foundation/OrcaSlicer-bambulab/issue...

This is admittedly a bit tinfoil hat, but they wouldn't be the first company to attempt to legislate away the competition.

More likely, it's technical incompetence. It's just easier (for their cloud) to send everything through their cloud

i'm mostly printing small mechanical parts and i can't say i have any complaints, i assume a modern prusa would be much better, surely there are other FDM printers that are good?

Of course, many prefer to break their license agreement because They Really Want It, in effect daring Bambu to get aggressive with license enforcement. They probably won't...

Developer mode doesn’t require the proprietary binary.

It seems more likely they want it as a revenue source at some point.

That's an artificial vendor tie-in, and arguably a feature that only involves their client app and their backend. It's understandable if access to their backend is restricted to a subset of their users if that's the business model they wish. Preventing paying customers from using the hardware they bought and paid for by imposing artificial restrictions is not cool.

A different way of looking at it is that Bambu is saying if you want to use their cloud you have to send everything through their cloud. Stupid? Sure. It's very much a technically solvable problem. But I don't think there was any rug pull (this time; in Jan 2025 they tried...)

I think this is all more out of incompetence than malice. Something bad happens, exposing wildly inadequate programming expertise, they panic and over correct, and the community pushes back. They're great at making 3D printers, terrible at cloud infra.

the explanation for that is here https://youtu.be/II2QF9JwtLc

basically louis found that not using AI to design his website drastically reduced the hits he would get from google.

Some of the proposed 3d printer laws will require printers being sold to be capable of evaluating what you are using them for and blocking “bad” usages. I’m not aware of any such legislation around firearms.

i bought the dang thing, let me decide how I use it.

Like Adobe's 'creative' software and Onshape, they are working as hard as possible to make YOU pay more to have less.

Prusa.

But for example I had some problems with my linear rods, talked to support for just a few minutes and 2 days later I had replacement parts at my door. This was a few years back though.

Also they give firmware updates, and even hardware upgrade for years! This IS really nice and I'm not sure any other printer manufacturer that sells to private people does this.

Yes, your upfront price is a bit higher. I say it's worth it.

I think it depends mostly on how you expect to use it. There may be alternatives that give you perfect prints with minimal fuzz. But for me it was great to have a machine I dare play around with. Like getting a tractor before a race car :)

It was absurdly cheap for its spec (£260 is what I paid, delivered) and can be run entirely without internet access with no issues. People were a bit miffed when they announced a v2 with multi-filament support, but they just announced an addon to upgrade the first version to a similar spec and it's again really cheap - £55 delivered here in the UK.

If I was printing more professionally I'd probably go for a Prusa, but the cost/benefit isn't there for someone new to it, unless you have plenty of dosh - in which case go for it. As someone getting into it, the price of the Centauri Carbon is so reasonable that it's hard to argue against it.

By "many" do you mean Bambu Lab themselves who are violating the AGPL license of Prusa slicer & predecessors with their non-AGPL, proprietary networking plugin?

They're choosing to violate the license because they don't think anyone will actually dare to sue them, and they're probably right. Ascribing some sort of moral righteousness to Bambu's actions and accusing users of breaking their license is hysterical.

By attempting to stop users from using their AGPL code they are behaving illegally.

The current monetization that they are using is that you can charge for a print on their platform and they take a cut of the sale. If you don’t charge for the design, then it is still free hosting and delivery.

I see where the worry is, but at the moment it seems like people are imagining a worse case scenario.

I use LAN mode, plus a home assistant plugin to restore the lost functionality. The default webcam is pretty bad so I’ve also mounted a better one to my printer for a live video view that’s at more than 1fps.

The main thing I’ve lost by using lan mode is printing from my phone? I think there are ways to do that. But OrcaSlicer has so many options that are frequently worth adjusting over random presets other creators used; it’s a strictly better experience compared to printing on mobile.

I think there is some niche “cancel printing of one specific object” feature that I dont know how to use without the mobile app. If you are printing many objects at once, and one fails, you can cancel a specific part/object using the mobile app. Not sure how to do that with OrcaSlicer + lan mode, or if it’s even possible. (Edit: OrcaSlicer doesn’t support it. The home assistant plugin might? Bambu studio in lan mode doesn’t support it either, it requires the mobile app)

The issue here is less "they put in a restriction" and more "they are trying to bankrupt/imprison consumers for daring to modify the property they purchased."

No, we aren’t being blocked. Turn on LAN mode, pair regular Orca slicer, ignore Bambu for the rest of eternity. Plenty of people have done it.

They've bought a machine that executes gcode and that it does (at least to my understanding) regardless of where that gcode comes from.

If you want special secret sauce gcode from the bambu cloud, you need to use the bambu cloud.

Those are not the same thing, so IMO it is legit what they do there, because it's such a clear-cut split. You own the physical thing but not the ecosystem around it.

___

I would of course personally never buy a bambu lab printer, because they're cloud-tied nonsense that was going to behave exactly like that (the split between hw and ecosystem), but other people knew that too and still bought it, because "what a nice ecosystem".

idk. I just don't think that "right to repair" should mean "right to be saved from the consequences of my own bad actions".

Those bad actions continuing to have no real painful consequences (and with that no real learnings + behavioral correction) after all is why the state of tech has become as bleak as it is right now.

And, honestly, if you can afford a bambu premium machine, there's a 97% chance that you could easily shoulder a total write-off. There's also a 97% chance that your ego can't, but that's the main thing causing all the bad things in the world and should've died a long time ago. Approximately post-highschool.

This looks like the kind of fake foundation website someone vibecodes to trick people into downloading a Trojan horse.

You can use an LLM to generate a website format and then take 10 minutes to review it and put real text on it.

This is just lazy excuse making. Don’t let a smooth talking YouTuber override what you can see with your own eyes.

(I get that web vitals might be taken into account, but you don't need a slop generator to make a static page)

You're just saying that Bambu users feel the need to purposely circumvent Bambu's artificial restrictions to be able to continue to use Bambu hardware they bought and paid for.

No matter how you frame this, this ain't right.

This is something I learnt early in my start up career, "You are not your customer"; what you value and what your customers value may not be the same.

I'm skeptical but I don't have time to watch the entire video so I don't want to cast an initial judgement on if he's correct or if it just has to do with his specific copy.

i'd say that when louis discovered that AI websites work better, it broke him in that regard. the choice is now creating a website that i own, as in "this is mine, i made this". or a website that works with google. but i'd want to distance myself from that website as far as possible. "i didn't make this myself, i needed this for google. i don't want to touch it"

If you want to use Bambu's software against their TOS, OK you wouldn't be alone in that, but there's no moral high ground in it.

there is a huge difference between creating AI slop because i am lazy (which i think most people doing that are) and creating AI slop because otherwise google gives your website a bad rating.

now you and i may not care about google ratings, but many other people do, and the end result will be that all websites that want good ratings will end up being AI slop.

somehow we need to send google a message to stop that.

So to say you spend significantly less money for a product that will be changed whenever bambu sees fit to whatever extend they see fit.

I regret my bambu purchase a lot. I have to keep up with all the ways bambu wants to lock in my hardware and take it basically away from me.

> If you want to use Bambu's software against their TOS

How does the TOS get involved here? I don't use their TOS. Why would or should they be able to enforce it? Note that it also depends on the jurisdiction. For instance, Microsoft's EULA never had any legal bearings in the EU.

There’s a small benefit of anti-circumvention where businesses sell hardware for cheaper with restrictions and a TOS that prevents bypassing them. But even that doesn’t apply here because Bambu changed the software after purchase.

...

What are they even trying to rank for? It doesn’t make sense.

"Computer Vision Model and Nozzle Telemetry Analysis Detect Print Error"?

In most countries, that would violate consumer rights. There's an ethics argument here.

This isn’t a PC Load Letter we can trust!

Eg. they are paying random people to host their models exclusively on MakerWorld (where the CCP tells you what's okay to print; try searching for anything 'Jinping'...). They are obviously pouring enormous amounts of cash into marketing on social media, especially YouTube (a lot of large maker channels became full-on advertisement platforms).

Their expenses are evidently enormous. There is no way they are running sustainable. It's a long con.