While I agree with the most valuable users statement, I can’t imagine that is how they see it. Or that they even should realistically care from a purely financial standpoint. Most users buy their printers and just use them with whatever software came with them. And most of those didn’t even watch or read reviews. Or worse: they did, and possibly heard about the firmware and online thing and just didn’t care.
I disagree with your second part though. Voron is only relevant for the complete opposite end of the spectrum. People who are multi-discipline tinkerers (electronics, hardware, …) and capable and interested in building their own printer. Actual overlap with all Bambu customers is probably sub-1%. The commercial printers that are Voron-adjacent (inspired by or based on the design in some way) still have a different demographic and severely lack in software polish and especially out of the box experience. It isn’t remotely close. Even if they innovated over night and made it even with Bambu, there is nothing that would cause that to be actually relevant in the market without millions in marketing. They might be able to gain momentum, but only slowly and I highly doubt they can catch up to Bambu momentum even in years.
j4k3@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Voron carries the original community torch that started all of this with RepRap and Adrian Bowyer. That is not some minor guerilla thing around Voron specifically. It grew out of the era when Prusa started making excuses and doing anti community stuff. Like they are still great, but not for the same reasons that built them. You can’t build Prusa firmware and mod it easily like with a Marlin config or Klipper. And the Mini is a custom hacked Marlin config that looks nothing like Marlin at all. That killed community contributions and the iterative nature of open source. The offshoots and side projects of Voron used to exist around Prusa and were around RepRap before that. Joseph got his start with RepRap selling kits on the side. That is where the MKx nomenclature comes from.
Adrian Bowyer broke what was a stratasys commercial monopoly and singlehandedly built the open source community and entire hobby. If Adrian did not exist, there would be no hobby 3d printing at all. The whole thing is due to this open source project and the community it built. That is why Bambu is hated so much. They are a stratasys like parasite here to exploit and oppress as a capitalist cancer. They are the ultimate type of leopard eating face buy.