Long story short, Bambu Lab consists of ex-DJI personnel who set out to create a cheap, high quality made-in-China 3d printer that was truly plug-and-play, no tinkering required -- but closed source and locked to the cloud. They succeeded.
The problem is that the 3d printer community has always been heavily in favor of open source, open community, very much in the spirit of RepRap, GNU, Linux, and so on. One major point of contention has been that the Bambu printers print awfully well for an alleged greenfield hardware and software project -- it is worth noting that the open source projects RepRap and Marlin have gotten printing to where it is over many years of open source contributions. This has led to rumors that Bambu could have only done this by taking open source contributions and then locking their fork down -- a major allegation since most 3d printing firmwares are GPL based.
People should wake up and outright refuse to purchase anything from Bamboo Labs. It is clear that they do not intend to give back to open source after benefiting hugely from it and now on top, they are patching newer versions of the firmware to prevent installing an alternatives.
Was looking for a second printer (a coreXY, mine is a cartesian) and the X1 had all the same features as my printer (minus the lidar) except turnkey and enclosed. After discovering their corp culture I hard noped and I think I'll just bite the time bullet and build a voron.
No worries, open source has been supporting me for 20 years, it is the least I can do.
I've been going back and forth on the trident vs the 2.4, I need to do more research on the fixed gantry vs the flying gantry but then in the meantime just browsing what is out there and I find a qidi x-max 3, easy bambu competitor, runs klipper, the company seems friendly to open source, handles eng materials, heated chamber, fast. So now I am torn as to which way I am going to go. Also the qidi is not without it's problems from what research I have done but it seems like mostly early bugs.
