I have been a long time Prusaslicer user but lately I’m running into a limitation. Hole XY size compensation is a big missing feature which I have seen in Cura. Also Cura handles lithophanes really well.
I do not like the UI of Cura but do like the Prusaslicer one.
What slicer do you prefer?
It’s a bit old school and lacks some features of newer slicers, but I still use Simplify3D quite a bit. If you’re printing stuff that is largely just “a box with holes” (I print a lot of planters for my indoor and outdoor garden), its great. I only really print functional parts like that, so its hard for me to think of any models where Orca produces better GCode for my jobs. That being said, I have Orca configured just in case Simplify3D ever goes away.
I’ll go ahead and say prusa meets my needs and it is what I’m using on arch. Maybe I’ll try orca based on this thread. I don’t even understand your problem so I suspect you are a more sophisticated user!
Orca is my preference. I had started with Cura, but had nonsensical random issues trying to run my Ender printer. Had short-term issues with Orca crashing and having display issues when I moved to Linux, but that appears to be fixed. Orca is back to being regularly maintained, and has plenty of great features. If you read about some new slicer features or techniques online that people are working on, Orca’s probably got it.
Another bump for orca slicer. I use it daily for work and it’s an excellent slicer. The new plugin system is also sooo exciting for what is possible.
The alpha for Prusa slicer 3.0 is also really nice, and the pinning of common settings is really freaking nice, but until I can test it on non-Prusa machines, I’ll have to wait…
Ironically, Cura for some of the same reasons you list: I think everything derived from Slic3r is a dumpster fire of UX. Yes, I see Cura has started to lag behind. Yes, the visualization is nowhere near as smooth. And yes, every time I try Prusa Slicer/Orca Slicer I come running back to Cura. I will say that Orca seems the one to look for, as it’s trying to improve the situation of the aforementioned dumpster fire…
It’s not helping that the Orca profile for my printer must be straight up made by a competing company, because it makes my old Ender 3 look like the fastest thing on earth, while the Cura one is pretty much flawless.
Orca slicer is where it’s at in my opinion
Orca … buttttt, there is an upcoming massive update to Prusa slicer which might make me switch 🧐
ReplicatorG /s
I use Orca now, and occasionally Cura for the old machines that I haven’t bothered to upgrade past 2014-era electronics.
Orca
I still user superslicer because my profiles work well, definitely want to have a closer look at preflight though.
I personally started out with Cura and it was rather good until I moved over to Linux full time. After an update, I hit this issue. Cura’s performance was also just terrible on my system under Linux. I started looking at other options and also replaced my printer shortly afterwards.
I bought a Creality K1C and that sort of shepherded me into CrealityPrint. And it was fine, but as Creality has moved to enshitify their offerings, I decided to move away from that and just went upstream on it to Orca. And it’s also fine. I do have issues with the camera in my current printer (the K1C) and that is a known issue. Creality did some non-standard fuckery with their camera streaming, so the problem really is on the hardware side. I also find myself struggling to find settings, but I think that’s a “me” problem and just a matter of learning how Orca organizes things. I also find Orca’s automatic brim setting is kinda overzealous about adding a brim to things. But overall, I’m happy with it.
Orca, but Preflight is definitely growing on me! It’s got some really unique stuff
I use Orca because I have a mixed environment with a an old Prusa mk3s running klipper and a Bambu A1 mini combo and I intend to add an Elegoo CC2 later this winter.
I want a one slicer to rule them all. So, Orca it is.
Orca but I’m looking at preflight.
Indeed preflight looks interesting. I will likely move from prusa to orca but some of the features of preflight look really nice.
I’ve been looking at preflight for a few months now, I keep coming back to test it but I’m not really impressed with it so far TBH. It feels clunky to use, I have some stability issues, and performance is just kind of OK. It still seems like it has a really long way to go before it becomes an actual competitor that could replace the more common slicers like prusa and orca.
I installed Cura and it never gave me a reason to switch… until it started to get just impossible to keep it running. My take on Cura is “it’s a fine slicer, but a terrible program.”
I used to run it on a Raspberry Pi, but then they made it impossible to run on ARM. Gentoo abandoned it because Cura made it impossible to build reliably. I don’t remember what the issue I had on Arch (on x86_64, even) was, but it was a pain to even make it run there as well.
So I switched to Prusaslicer and it hasn’t given me a reason to change yet. I think Orca is kindof “Prusaslicer but with more bells, whistles, and gongs”, but I have yet to really need much more functionality than Prusaslicer offers. The bricklaying thing seems kinda cool, but I haven’t had a specific use for it. And most of what I print is very utilitarian rather than artistic, so if I tinker, it tends to be more with the model than the slicer settings. (Honestly, most of what I print is models I designed myself from scratch in OpenSCAD.)
