It’s not just you, there’s a financial incentive to write “reviews” which convince the reader to immediately buy the product, because of referral links. Even disregarding that the fact that it takes much more time and knowledge to write an actual unbiased review, you’ll most likely earn less money as you might dissuade readers from buying it, or even if you just make them think a bit more before going through with the purchase and they end up buying the printer somewhere else. I’ve started referring to these kind of pages as “fake reviews”, it plagues almost every product category and it has made it very unreliable to use the internet for buying advice.

Though I suppose it’s even worse for 3d printing, as some manufacturers have been known to pay youtubers for positive reviews and to lie about their competitor’s printers. And even the ones who don’t get cash in the hand still have some incentive to bias their reviews, as pointing out a printer’s flaws or recommending to buy something else would make them less likely to receive more free products to review in the future.

It’s literally the same (probably exaggerated) marketing material as Sovol themselves are trying to sell their Kickstarter project with, reformatted to look like an article. Not surprising that it has a couple of “Click Here to Buy Now: $999 $1299 ($300 off). Hurry, only 94/200 left!” referral links…

It might be true that Sovol has made some of the least bad budget printers recently, but anyone who has brand loyalty to any of the companies that make cheap 3d printers in China is bound to get disappointed sooner or later. Years ago Creality also made relatively good printers, using high quality parts and with acceptable quality control (e.g. OG Ender 3 era) and when they became market leaders they dropped the quality, and I would be surprised if Sovol didn’t do the same given the opportunity. I’d wait a couple of months after it’s released, and try to find some actual reviews.

3D Printing discord’s List of 3D printers even has a generic warning for Kickstarter printers:

More of a warning against kickstarter machines, up until now almost all of them huge failures, with delays in shipping and troubles in terms of QC. They just use the early backers as free quality check/beta testing for the most part. Remember you are not buying a product on kickstarter, you are paying for a possibility to get a product.

Might as well link to the original post on reddit, I don’t think Tom’s Hardware much value in their summary of it :)

If I, a humble computer hobbyist can figure out Nix, why don’t more users do so, and why is Nix so niche?

My guess as to why this isn’t a more central feature of Linux distros is that this is not something most users need. If you need to reinstall the OS because you broke it, then a full system backup is probably more convenient, even if it’s less than optimal to back up packages which you could download. If you need to reinstall the OS because you want a clean slate when upgrading to a new version, then your package list for the old version could cause a lot of conflicts as maintainers regularly remove and add new packages.

I have backed up my zsh, vim, tmux, etc. configs and written a few shell scripts which install them and download vim plugins etc. If I ever need to reinstall the OS I would use these. However, in the last 20 years since I ditched Windows I have reinstalled Linux exactly two times: Once because I was an idiot and didn’t have a proper backup when I accidentally formatted the wrong HDD, and once when I switched from Xubuntu to Fedora in which case a package list wouldn’t have been usable.

I think the easiest way might be to put all the names in the box here and press “randomize”, if it comes to that.

You mean you have turned it off completely? I used it with the stock E3v2 extruder and BMG in Bowden mode, and later with BMG in direct drive mode, without any retraction related problems and I think it’s the same for the majority of 3d printer owners. Perhaps your printer had some other issue, which only showed up in combination with retraction?

Did you calibrate flow rate, retraction and z offset? Teaching Tech has a pretty thorough guide for all things calibration.

DRM filament spools has already been a thing, XYZprinting tried it but luckily it didn’t catch on and they went bankrupt a few years ago.

I use Fedora (KDE) and game a lot. While I mostly like it, I’ve had some problems with it that were non-trivial to solve, so if you’re a Linux beginner I would not necessarily recommend it to you.

Perhaps Bazzite would be a good option? It’s based on Fedora and created with gaming in mind. I got it recommended here and installed it on a friend’s kid’s computer and he’s very happy with it so far.

There’s also Nobara which builds on Fedora to create a gaming-focused distro.

Paper GTK theme is a little bit similar, though with more vibrant colours ofc.

It says “imported” so probably made for a fraction of that in China.

The game, the movie, or the keyboard?

Official repo says $114 per arm, but I didn’t check their math :) https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot

Tbh the majority of my FOSS contributions were to fix problems affecting me personally :) but I’m glad that they’re helping others too. This one is definitely the one that goes on my CV though hehe

Thanks for the kind words :)

In all fairness, I’ve had some really dicey problems on Linux. I think the most difficult problem I’ve encountered was when I bought a USB soundcard which only worked in legacy mode, but using Wireshark and the USB audio class specification I managed to track down the bug in Linux’ usb-audio module, so now I’m technically a kernel contributor :)

For me the difference is that when I get a problem on Linux, it usually tries to provide me with the information I need to figure out what goes wrong, and due to its open nature it tries to make it easy to fix things. Also the majority of the time, Linux is working flawlessly. Windows on the other hand, is plagued by bugs and annoyances that show up on a weekly, if not daily, basis. And when issues happen, they come with little information and are often impossible to fix yourself since the OS is locked down.

The problem I’ve had with bad themes (e.g. black on black text/icons) seem to stem from apps using system/fallback colours, e.g. not defining it’s own list background because it assumes it’s always going to be white. But I can’t say if it happens more often with Gtk or Qt… Most recently it happened both with GIMP (Gtk) and FreeCAD (Qt)

Glad you enjoyed it!

As for the choice of distribution, the installation of Bazzite was actually far from trouble free. The precise issue and its solution escapes my mind at the moment, but it refused to boot at first, and I had to spend more hours than I had hoped for before it was up and running. But after that it seems to be stable, the only question the kid has sent me was “can it break my computer if I switch Project Zomboid to the beta branch?” so I assume everything is working well now :D (There was a warning about switching to beta, saying that you should make a backup because things could break, and he wasn’t sure what they meant)

So fun watching someone try Linux as their first OS, none of the “Linux is difficult because I learned how to use Windows” or “Linux is bad because it’s not exactly like Windows” comments :D Roblox stopped working when the devs intentionally blocked Wine, but he just shrugged and said he didn’t play it that much anyway.

It’s a little heart breaking hearing him often ask which parts he could buy to get more FPS, because he’d need to replace half the computer to get a newer CPU and DDR4 RAM, since I suspect the DDR3 could be the current bottleneck. But other than that he’s very happy with the computer.

Glad to hear it’s working well for her. I used Xubuntu myself in the past but switched to Fedora KDE on a whim :). When my wife wanted to ditch Windows I thought Xubuntu would be a good choice for her, but honestly I was surprised with how many different problems and errors we ran into while installing it on her computers. Granted it’s more stable now, but during the first couple of months I occasionally had to spend hours trying to get pretty basic stuff working, when it required more advanced Linux knowledge to fix.