If you are willing to spend the money, I would highly recommend a Prusa. The quality of service and support alone is worth the extra money. If the cost of a Prusa bothers you, I would point you at Qidi as a more budget friendly brand. If I was starting over and looking to buy my first printer, I would be looking at the Core One or the Qidi Plus 4. And Qidi is set to release their own AMS called the Qidi box for the Plus 4 here shortly.

Edit to add: There is nothing to fear from Klipper. MainSail is easy to pickup and use.

3D printing and lost PLA casting is a valid process. And is something that can be done in your own backyard if you want. Aluminum and brass are common metals used by home casters. So it’s kind of cool to see.

As an old toolmaker, I do take exception to this being called “Damascus”. To even call it pattern welded even would be very generous.

Gimme mah Cube!

And the wobblies and explosions are cool too!

I remember when Walmart sold boxed releases of RedHat and Mandrake. My first installs were fueled by $20 boxed releases at Walmart. I was so bummed when they stopped. But I could send away for Ubuntu releases on a CD for free.

Thanks to Trump, there appears to be some initiatives in Europe for governments to switch to open source. It seems they want to try and get out of relying on US companies for their technology. That would make a large jump in the user base.

They have tried before, and not had the best luck in dropping US vendors. Things seem to run out of steam at some point and they switch back. It will be interesting to see if things stick more this time.

I’m pulling for them to succeed.

I briefly looked at LFS with the thought to try it a long time ago. No… Just no…

That’s not an OS, that is a psychotic break with reality. Fortunately, you can take shots for it…

I did Gentoo for a bit also. Ain’t enough hours in the day…

Despite not being a gamer myself, Gamers are or should be a hotly contested demographic for Linux to chase and capture. And thanks to Steam, there is a shift happening as gaming gets easier.

Real men and women run Slack. Tarballs Yum!

To head off the zealots-- ./././

My first guess is the author is aggregating the numbers from either the distros download data directly or they are getting the numbers from some place like Distro Watch. You can even get a crude sense of the increase in new users if you hang out in a distro help forum. I check the r/Fedora sub on reddit a few times a week, (I run Fedora 42 BTW), and there has been enough of an increase in new users posting “OMG, I just ditched Windows and look at my shiny new Gnome/KDE desktop!” to be annoying to some people. It can be hard to find those posts from people looking for help with a problem sometimes.

What no one can say is just how long those shiny new users will stick with Linux or run back to Windows at a later date. My gut feeling is, if half of this new 5% sticks it’s a major, major victory for all the distros.

It looks to be a pain between the tools needed and the hassle. It supposedly takes between 30 minutes to a couple of hours depending on your skills and some luck.

Installing Graphene doesn’t lessen the danger of your Pixel bursting into flames because of the old and dangerous batteries.

Oh my, I hear Google is going to brick the batteries of the 6a just like they did with the 4a phones. Due to worry about them catching fire. So good luck!

Glances at my new Pixel, Welp, I guess I ain’t ever goin’ to Catalonia. Not that I was planning to go there anyway.

***Tinfoil conspiracy: Maybe this a scare tactic to keep the British out of Spain.

Do you think a 5 bed hospital will have the money to afford a robotic surgeon?

I’ve seen hydraulic cylinders up to a mere 150 tons, but they both used vee threads. But those cylinders can had far,far bigger than that. That would be a very good application of buttress threads. Much like the balls screws on a punch press. Lots of force in one direction.

Surgery is not required. You only need to 5% smater than the tool you are using.

A properly fitted straight bladed screw driver will fit snugly in the slot along it’s entire length. This offers more than the ‘two points of contact’ that your poorly chosen screw driver does. Add a hollow ground blade, they get an amazingly powerful grip. Learn to fit a screw driver properly and you will seldom have a problem with a slotted screw. As toolmakers and high end gunsmiths know and you don’t.

Of course, if you have neither the skill or enough ambition to be bothered to ensure the tool fits the fasteners correctly, you probably should choose a more foolproof tool and fastener.

At that diameter, I would probably recommend a bottle cap thread. It’s a rounded profile that is easy to print.

Under Quality – Layer Height – First Layer Height. Adjust the layer height as needed. Generally speaking, your first layer should be no less than half the nozzle diameter. So, a .40mm nozzle first layer height should be .20mm. Thought for larger beds, you may wish to increase the first layer height a bit to help with bed adhesion over a wide area.

My first inclination is to got to Quality – Walls and surfaces – Avoid Crossing walls and check that box. See what happens when you print your Benchy.

If you still have issues, go to you filament settings for the filament you are printing with, (the little pencil to the right of the filament box), make sure you have the Advanced slider on, click on the Settings Overrides tab and check the Length, Z-hop height, On surfaces, (select All Surfaces in the drop down box to the right), Retraction speed, (the default is fine), the De-retraction speed, (set to zero), Travel Distance threshold, Retract on layer change, Wipe while retracting, and wipe distance.

This is a start.