elucubra

Are there some hidden gem or outstanding value cards out there in the sub 200€ range? Used, if they blow out of the water some newer ones for the price, are OK.

What distros do you install on your mom's, sister's, buddy's, etc machines?

My go-to has usually been Mint, but I wonder if there is a better set and forget, easily understood distro to install on the computers of those who will rely on you for support.

atomic distros would probably be a good option, but it seems that same disk dual boot is a no no, and that can be a deal breaker.

I'm thinlink QoL, for me, that is.

Has anyone run two nema dual shaft motors mechanically coupled in series? the Ender 5 plus uses a dual shaft to drive both Y axes, and I'm thinking of adding another, in series, coupled with an elastic coupler.

Thoughts?

Most of the multi color printers out there are AMS/MMU or similar, and there are many DIY options, like Armored Turtle or ECF.

They are an evolutionary dead end. Slow, wasteful, expensive to run.

The Prusa XL, or the Snapmaker U1 are the future direction.

Also a good CoreXY machine like vorons/sovols/ratrigs/VZ, etc can be upgraded with the Bondtech INDX tool changer.

We are talking 5x lower print times, 5x lower material costs.

There is going to be a glut of used Bambus and other multi material unit printers, when print farms unload them, since the tool changers will massively boost their bottom line.

Comments?

I know that many mods for some printers aim to enlarge the volume, but I've been considering downsizing somewhat my plus, as I have moved to a smaller house and the plus is a bit too large. An option would be to trade for a regular Ender 5, but I have had one, and the plus is better in many respects. Just the 4 guide/2 bed screws put it in a different league.

I really like the plus, I have modded it (hotend, direct drive, Klipper, board...), and have it pretty well dialed in, and I'm going to convert to "CoreX", a cheaper hybrid alternative to CoreXY, that removes a lot of weight from the gantry, ergo, higher speed and accuracy.

I'm going to end up with a respectably fast and accurate single color printer, and I'm considering adding the INDX tool changer.

I have googled, but either my Google-fu fails me or it's just too obscure of a subject.

Has anyone seen something like this?

I'm installing a second disk in my desktop, and I'm going to install Linux.

I've had dual boot on all my machines since forever. As in decades. I'm an old hand. Perfectly happy in a terminal.

I have Mint in (on?) my laptop because lazy.

I'm asking about QOL. The only "Gaming" I do are flight Sims, and although I haven't tried, I believe X-plane is Linux native. However, I do use some apps which are not Linux native, so I'd need some form of wine or performant VMs.

The PC is a Ryzen 9+64Gb, so it should handle a lot of things quite well.

I've been playing with both in VMs, but I can't get a feel for what my virtualization and wine use would be.

BTW, I might do an install of both, maybe side to side, without commitment to either, and then decide. It's going to be a blank slate install anyway.

From my trials, both seem comfortable enough.

I've heard good things about both.

Opinions?

No affiliation or anything. I’m simply stoked!

Elegoo Rapid PETG. I like PETG, but with my printer (Ender 5 Plus, slightly tuned; DD, All metal hotend, dual gear extruder, accelerometer…) regular PETG is sloooow. I’m already up to 180 mm/s it prints beautifully. As with all PETG it likes to be thoroughly dry. Once dry it prints like a PLA+. Beautiful definition.

I paid about 15€ per roll, but buying a 4 pack, it comes to about 12,50€ per roll, so about the same as PLA.

I’m just not buying regular PLA, or PETG anymore. The new generation of materials just leave the older ones in the dust. I had a few rolls of standard PETG that I had slowly been using up, but I sold the last 2, I couldn’t bear the waiting times.

I’m going to try a bunch of the new modified materials, like ABS plus and HT, ASA plus, and especially Polymaker’s HT-PLA-GF, a glass fiber high temp PLA that can be annealed in boiling water without deformation to withstand temps like 150º. Nuts! They are basically sold out until August, but once back in stock I’m buying the stuff.

Interesting times to be in the hobby.

We are happy, very happy, that you have joined the light side of the force, but here you are preaching to the choir. Go knock on doors and help others see the light. Oh, and sending some money to one of the thousands of FOSS projects that keep this running would be nice too.

Anyway, welcome again.

/Not_a_Rant

I currently have an HP micro server gen 8 with Xpenology with hybrid raid, which works fairly well, but I’m 2 major versions behind. I’m quite happy with it, but I-d like to have an easier upgrade process, and more options. My main use is NAS and a couple of apps. I’d like to have more flexibility, to easily have an arr suite, etc.

Considerdering the hassle of safely upgrading xpenology because of the hybrid raid (4+4+2+2 Gb HDDs) I-d like a setup which I can easily upgrade and modify.

What are my options here? What RAID options are there that easily and efficiently these these disks?

I don-t have the spare money right now to replace the 2Gb disks. Planned in the future

I've been using rustdesk for while, and it works very well for me. The news of it being somewhat opaque, and developed from China, makes me a bit nervous.

Is there a FOSS equivalent that won't make me jump through hoops, and be easily installed by someone else remotely?

I would like to be able to have it run at startup in Linux and windows, have a fairly complete feature set, like file transfer, copy paste, etc.

Also it'd be great if it could be easily installed by someone else remotely. I do SMB support, usually onsite, which is why it's not cost effective to pay for a Teamviewer or Anydesk license.

I'm taking a look through flathub, but recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

What do you consider to be the "Goldilocks" distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc... You get the idea.

I'm not a newb, these last few years I've lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I've used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn't install something (which I can't remember), and that turned me off.

Oh I'm on Mint right now, because lazy, but it's acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don't have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I'm a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.