I had to boot into windows again and everything was terrible

Nobara Linux is out, Kubuntu 23.10 is my new best friend

Last time you all got mad at me, it was because I said Nobara linux was awesome and that you should use it. That got a whole bunch of you super mad at me. To be fair, I see what gets you mad, and I’m not impressed. But anyhoo, I, like many turbo nerds distro hop. It’s fun (actually kind of painful at times) but I’ve been on Kubuntu 23.10 for a few weeks now and after a rocky start (look it up, I’m not a news aggregator), I’ve settled in for a bit. There really wasn’t anything wrong with Nobara, but after you all started raging against Ubuntu snaps, I had to see how terrible it was. To be fair, snaps do kind of suck. After living the flatpack/appimage lifestyle on the KDE centric version of Nobara, it’s hard to go to other distros that don’t roll it up into a nice easy UI for you. But hey, I can chmod +x like the best of them. Here’s the reality. I’m still using the same Lenovo legion laptop. The 6.5 linux kernel seems to really work well on this thing, which is what Kubuntu 23.10 uses. Suddenly all my brightness, volume, rgb color keys all work without the laptop crashing. It’s a little thing, but super satisfying. I digress….

The Urgency of Using Windows

You may not know, but I have a few side hustles. One is a 3d design company. I do some basic CAD work for people, I’m working on something for a dental office right now, but mostly I design gardening planters and home organization solutions and then 3d print them in cool filaments to sell on Etsy. This isn’t an advertisement, but if you’re curious, open this in a new tab. Anyway, I’ve been using a trio of Creality CR-10S Pro V2 printers with the Tinymachines firmware.

They are pretty solid, if slow. I make use of the 310x320x400mm bedsize for a few of my main designs, especially my main planter, which is a 10 inch planter that takes ~31 hours for the planter and ~17 hours for the tray. Since I have multiple printers I typically print them in parallel. But when I get a bunch of orders, it takes a long time. I’ve had a Prusa XL with two toolheads on pre-order for over a year, with no time table from Prusa. It’s a corexy printer, which basically means it’s super fast. Roughly 300x faster than the creality’s. Then I got invited to a craft fair and realized, all my printers are currently barely keeping up. Which makes sense, I have as of this writing, 202 five star reviews. People love my designs, as simple as they are. I had to find a corexy printer large enough to print and I needed it fast. So I reached out to tinymachines about getting a Vivedino troodon. They said they had one 300x300x400 troodon in parts, they could put it together for me in two weeks. It took five, and fedex beat the crap out of it, but no matter I’ve got it and it’s been printing, nearly non stop since. Damn, I’m digressing again… WINDOWS…..they built a profile for the troodon300 in Orca Slicer. Which is a fork of Bamboo slicer, which is a fork of Prusa Slicer…which is a fork of Super slicer…omg I don’t care! I use Cura. There is not profile for the troodon300 in Cura, and I have literally a few days until a craft fair. Tinymachines offers up Orca slicer, from their GitHub with built in profiles, but only for Windows and MacOs. No worries, I always leave the OEM windows partition on my laptop, and just shrink the NTFS partition. I’ll just boot into windows aaaaand omfg…..

Bluetooth Mouse connectivity

My Lenovo Legion gaming mouse only supports 1 connection. Which means as soon as I boot into windows, I have to make a choice. USB cable, USB dongle, or pair it in windows, knowing that it won’t work in Linux when I reboot again. I choose to flip the switch to USB dongle, and plug that bad boy in. After all, I’ve got a free port since the USB keyboard and headphones are plugged in already through my monitor. So I go to work learning how to slice stuff in Orca slicer. But while I’m here, I also wanted to slice something (in Cura) for the creality’s. We needed to do some simple changes to support structures on our wall hooks. Now here’s the annoyance… The creality printers use a microsd card, and the only adapter I have is USB. I unplug the mouse and use my laptop touch pad so I can copy/paste them. How do people live like this?!

Windows Update Woes: An Unplanned Reboot in the Heat of 3D Modeling

I was blindsided by the operating system's infamous penchant for untimely updates. In the midst of meticulously slicing a complex 3D model for the upcoming craft fair—a task requiring uninterrupted focus—Windows decided it was the perfect moment to initiate an update, culminating in an unsolicited and forceful reboot. This interruption wasn't just a minor hiccup; thankfully, Orca slicer saves as you go. No starting from scratch. This experience was a stark reminder of the often criticized aspect of Windows management: the lack of user control over system updates. For professionals and hobbyists alike, who rely on their computers for time-sensitive and intricate tasks, such interruptions can be more than just an annoyance—they can be detrimental to productivity and deadlines. This incident with Windows update not only disrupted my workflow but also reinforced the fact that, Microsoft is not our friend. They do not care about you, or the work you are doing. The hilarious part was that when it rebooted, I raged out of the room, only to come back to a Kubuntu Login screen. Now I had to rabit hole. Does Orca slicer have a Linux build? Yes! It’s available as an appimage. However, this printer is NOT available. I spent probably two hours inspecting the windows folders in an attempt to figure out how to add this printer to my Linux copy, and did not get there. Seriously Orca slicer devs, where is my export/import printer options? Why is this harder than a right click? I didn’t get there, but did start to manually make the profile only to realize how much time I was spending on this. Time I didn’t have because, did I mention I have a craft fair to attend in only a few days?! Ugggh… back to windows……

Oh! You thought you were done with Updates? lol get wrecked noob

One disadvantage of never using windows, it seems to queue updates that require OTHER updates. FFS, as if it wasn’t bad enough I have to use this marketing tool of an Operating system, it won’t even let me use it for more than about 10 minutes. So after rebooting AGAIN…. I’m back to working on comparing Orca slicer and Cura slicer settings. This is a tedious task because some of my designs require a lot of non-default settings, a handful of first layer changes, supports with a ton of individual….you don’t care… that’s fine. I finally got there, the Troodon was printing like an NFL defense blitzing. I rebooted into Kubuntu, and had this wave of comfort roll over me. It just gets out of the way. Except for snaps. I get it now.

Let’s solve this with a VM

Now like any self respecting turbo nerd ( I coined that. It's mine. Feel free to use it whenever you want) I have an unraid server.

This is what OpenAI thinks a Linux nerd is, enjoy:

Now my unraid server mostly uses docker, but I hear it can do VM’s. So I get myself a windows 10 iso (cuz screw that 11 nonsense) and spin up a VM. Holy crap. Windows 10 is unusable until you let it update for literally hours… OMFG MORE UPDATES! But anyway, I get past that. Install orca slicer, and cura only to be met with opengl issues. Now I don’t run VM’s on unraid often, certainly not windows VM’s. So I open a chatgpt tab and an unraid forum tab. I don’t find much, but chatgpt suggests using GPU pass through, which I’m not a huge fan of, but I pass through the geforce gt710, and that seems to solve it. Now how do I RDP into a windows VM from Linux…. there are literally dozens of options, I go with Remmina. I can’t speak about any of them. I’m not an expert, I’ve spent literally minutes, but it gets me there and now I can remote into this VM, open orca slicer and Cura slicer side by side and have my troodon300 profiles. After this craft fair, I’m going to figure out how to get both of these into Linux since both of them run fine. That’s probably about the time I’ll get the shipping alert for the Prusa XL and have to also have Prusa slicer…. sigh…..

If you made it this far, thank you.

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