I guess I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, I wouldn’t by it again (or anything from the company), but at the time (just before the company went completely haywire) the A1 was the right machine (“just works” with decent print quality) at the right price (on sale + discount) that got me into 3D printing … so, I “fell” for the YT marketing for sure, but I don’t regret it one second … now that I know that it’s a both use- and joyful technology for me I would gladly pay for a Prusa but at the time I wouldn’t have … and I would have missed out for sure … learned 3D modeling, manufacturing, design, skills that I wouldn’t want to miss.

I guess after well over 1000h of printing I don’t have to expect it to go up in flames, either …

For completeness I should also say that I never updated the firmware and transfer data using the SD card exclusively, it’s not connected to any network … but that was my expectation to begin with, I didn’t know much about 3D printing before and I thought that’s how they work anyway.

Switched to being a full-time Linux user around 2005, still love it …

Used AwesomeWM for a long time but a few years ago I switched to an even more minimalist WM a friend of mine is developing … still love it despite some bugs …

Tried a variety of IDEs but always ended up with Emacs …

And, last but not least, I’ve been developing my own software for music composition and performance for more than 10 years now, and use it every day … can’t say it’s the same because it always changes, but I use it practically every day :)

Hmm not sure whether my cutter directly accepts SVG, I have to check … in fact I’m using Inkscape to assemble everything and then just use the application to generate gcode … not sure whether I can skip that step because the SVG doesn’t contain any info regarding cutting speed, laser power etc …

vapoursynth

Oh I’ve never heard about that one …

The problem with Davinci I encountered was that very common encodings like x264 or x265 don’t work with the community edition and I can’t justify getting the pro version from an economic standpoint …

Supposedly a solution for Blender exists but I tried to make it work and failed :( https://www.cadsketcher.com/

If you don’t mind using text-based interaction you could give OpenSCAD a try … it’s like TinkerCAD (solids and holes) but with code …

I might be biased here because I’m a programmer by trade but I didn’t find it too hard … also mostly need boxy shapes … but still, I think it’s neat …

My personal top 3:

Video Editing - Kdenlive isn’t bad in and by itself but it seems really slow to work with, and getting any kind of smooth preview seems impossible even with proxy clips … the other day I bought a GoPro 3D camera, and I can cut, preview, rotate, reframe and encode with their Android app on my potato phone from 2021, and it feels snappy (I was surprised, really). Yet on my i7 laptop with Kdenlive, much simpler tasks feel much more sluggish on average …

CAD - I use OpenSCAD for 3D modeling and I love it, but sometimes a GUI-Based CAD program would be nice. I’m sure FreeCAD is powerful but the UI/UX aspect makes it hard to unlock that power. I’m a bit conflicted about it because I really don’t want to play down the efforts of the FreeCAD dev team, and it seems like everyone and their mothers talk badly about their UI/UX. But on the other hand I tried a couple times and got really frustrated, and I’m usually not one to shy away from steeper learning curves. Supposedly you can do CAD in Blender but I never really figured that out.

Laser cutting - While most slicers for 3D printers work on Linux, Lasercutting seems a different story. You can still use older versions of Lightburn but it’s not FLOSS and it seems strange to pay for a license if the support for your OS has been discontinued 2 versions ago (or one, not sure right now). I want to give Rayforge (https://rayforge.org/) a try soon but until then it’s LaserGRBL or the program that came with my laser cutter on a virtual machine.

Honorable mention: A linux phone would be nice.

I doesn’t “need” to be imported, the question is just, where do we see the future of federated (non-)platforms ? Do we want them to be “small and cozy” with a small and fairly narrow selection of content or do we want a non-corporate alternative that can compete in richness and variety of interesting content of all niches?

A lot of folks only seem to see the crappy part of youtube and other platforms, and don’t see the richness of content that exists ther. There’s still so much interesting stuff to be found. I don’t think there has ever been a bigger archive of, say, documentation about arts, crafts, history, food, than YT, even it its current enshittified form. If that’s an ocean of content, the Fediverse isn’t even a major river (at least that’s my impression).

If you don’t mind that, great. But I do, I’d love a non-corporate version to exist that can compete in terms of richness of content.

And monetary incentive is part of the puzzle, as it incentivizes people to spend time on it, which in terms generates a bigger audience, which in turn has a higher potential to support a wider range of content niches. Plain and simple.

I don’t agree, really … that’d limit the Fediverse to hobbyists.

It’s completely legitimate to look for income & exposure as a creator, whether you’re making music, visual art, or document your process making physical objects. Corporate platforms, as crappy as they might be, provide a path to that, and in many ways created viable path for creators to do what they like full-time. Not saying that it’s perfect or easy. But the Fediverse is currently no alternative at all …

Currently, restricting yourself to the Fediverse as an artist unfortunately means that you’re taking quite a hit in terms of exposure you can get. As long as that’s the case, and people even defend it, then we really can’t complain that the Fediverse isn’t attractive for a larger amount of people, and centralized platforms will always have the bigger draw.

I try to avoid corporate platforms as much as I can, but as a consumer I often feel starved of content. I haven’t found any interesting woodworking channels on PeerTube, or guitar repair channels, or whatever else I enjoy watching to wind down.

And as a creator, well … it’s not my source of income, but I sure would like it to be. And if I ever decide to make that step, I’m pretty sure that I’s have to make amends to my “no corporate platforms” approach. The Fediverse doesn’t feed you.

Same situation, more or less … but I honestly don’t remember anyone meeting their grim fate the way you described … you’d see people with a cast here and there (I got mine in gym class, of all locations), but I think all kids in my extended social groups made it to adulthood without major, life-altering physical damage …

I gladly accept the fossil label, but there’s no contrarian sentiment behind it … I just never felt any pain staying with X11.

Also, the window manager I use is developed by a friend who lives 10min away and texts me every time he has an update, and I love it … doesn’t work on Wayland, though …

Dunno, as a German, I’d find it ahistorical if everybody was using “Deutschland” … the nation-state as an idea, and a unified nation state, are relatively young. Before that, what we call Deutschland today was a mess. It’s no surprise that romance languages use some or another variation of “Allemagne” … the german dialect spoken around the southwestern border is still called “Allemannisch” even in Germany, same with “Saxon” and the variations “Saksa” to the east …

I kinda prefer it the way it is in this case, honestly …

Hmm I’ve been a coffee geek and bicycle nerd (hobby mechanic) since my teenage years, and ran a half-marathon in my mid 20ies … guess I’ve been 40 for a long time now …

Wait, that’s not what you’re supposed to do?

I get that … It’s just my impression that the “can’t teach an old dog new tricks” mentality is pretty prevalent in general and people might read an article and use it to confirm that mentality, see a phrase like “critical learning period is closed” and say “see, why even try”. Not you personally, just to be clear.

So I didn’t want to leave that uncommented because I think despite that we should foster a culture of learning at any age.

It might be scientifically accurate but I think the notion of an age cap is misguided. Just because it’s harder doesn’t mean it’s impossible, and the idea of an “age cap” just makes it seem like you shouldn’t even try (might just be my interpretation).

Also it’s just super helpful to learn something even though you’re not perfect.

I’ve started learning English at 10, put in a lot of work over the years, and it got to near-native in my late 20ies (certified by my language-nerd native-english-speaker wife). At 20 I had trouble booking hostel rooms over the phone.

In my 40ies now and I feel like most of the skills that make “me” today, including playing instruments, programming languages, all kinds of crafts, I learned way past ten and many of them past 20. Started learning Spanish at around 35, nowhere near native but decently conversational. About to start the next course in Catalan soon.

So, this is the one thing where I think people just should ignore the science (which is usually not my stance at all) and get cracking, you can teach an old dog new tricks, and it’s always helpful and fun.

My first ever smartphone (in 2015) was a BQ Aquaris 4.5 Ubuntu Edition that came with Ubuntu Phone pre-installed … a lightweight, 4.5" smartphone … there wasn’t much of an app ecosystem at the time but I didn’t miss it because up to that date I used a dumb phone, and the smartphone allowed me to do eMail and use a browser, which was enough for me.

At some point I accidentially dropped it on a hard floor and it broke, and I was quite unhappy that the company didn’t continue that line :(

I guess it depends a lot on what you think of as “an alternative”. I’m really happy using FOSS because I generally try to find a different angle on things, and it allows me to do that.

Luckily I’m not dependent on using common office software, the few spreadsheet tasks that I need can be done with online tools, either open or proprietary. For documents I usually use markdown and pandoc. For music making, I use my own software or Ardour for mastering, etc. For modeling and 3D printing I started using OpenSCAD.

There’s also many things that proprietary software just can’t do. Like, my day-to-day workflow is based on a minimalist approach to computing, with the most common operations being very easy to perform (browser, editor, terminal) … MacOS is always hailed for their great UI but honestly, it seems slow and clunky to me even though I used it daily for a long time …

Second this, I’ve tried TinkerCAD before and the whole Idea of CSG started to make sense, and then I found that OpenSCAD does something very similar, just with code … I find it very satisfying … I guess if you’re making highly asymmetrical, organic shapes, you might have some puzzles to solve … but I’m mostly making loudspeakers, so basically boxed with holes, and it’s not a huge problem.

Hmm I think the issue is that Ardour is more focused on recording than electronic music production … There’s more intuitive DAWs out there but I suppose in terms of what it can do it doesn’t have to stand back … compared to ProTools I’d say it’s still quite intuitive (not a high bar for sure).