As another fisher person, I’m interested in this. This could open a whole new world for wannabe lure makers. I can see myself dabbling in this since it appears cheap and easy enough to engage in.

Well, at least they are reading something…

Few consumer printers can print this material any better than PEEK. The Bambu H2D and Prusa’s HT90 can just do it. And $60 while cheaper than PEEK, still ain’t much of a bargin for the vast majority of hobbyists.

And you don’t think iPhones and Apple don’t know your location?

Suppessors are a common shooting accessory in many European countries because they do limit the noise for shooters and bystanders. And they are used with ear PPE while shooting. European shooters are often amazed that supressors require a special tax stamp for each unit in the US for something that they consider a basic safety device.

It would appear that major distros like RedHat/Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, etc are not overly concerned at this point. I would suspect that if they truely feared this happening, they would be moving very quickly to create patches or work arounds for this problem.

They got pills for that. Just sayin’

Vivaldi is OK, but I would replace it with something else. It’s a pretty busy UI and I have had issues with it freezing in Fedora 42 KDE.

Whelp, there goes social media…

Yeah, they have taken some things proprietary with software and hardware. This was done in response to Chinese manufacturers, and yes Bambu in particular, taking the proprietary pathway and not giving new ideas back to the open source community.

Now, Bambu making proprietary products is well within their right. But that makes life harder for a true open source manufacturer to make enough money to stay in business. So it ain’t taking 20/10 vision to read the writing on the wall if Prusa intends to stay in business. So there is a real need to protect themselves.

If you are willing to spend the money, I would highly recommend a Prusa. The quality of service and support alone is worth the extra money. If the cost of a Prusa bothers you, I would point you at Qidi as a more budget friendly brand. If I was starting over and looking to buy my first printer, I would be looking at the Core One or the Qidi Plus 4. And Qidi is set to release their own AMS called the Qidi box for the Plus 4 here shortly.

Edit to add: There is nothing to fear from Klipper. MainSail is easy to pickup and use.

3D printing and lost PLA casting is a valid process. And is something that can be done in your own backyard if you want. Aluminum and brass are common metals used by home casters. So it’s kind of cool to see.

As an old toolmaker, I do take exception to this being called “Damascus”. To even call it pattern welded even would be very generous.

Gimme mah Cube!

And the wobblies and explosions are cool too!

I remember when Walmart sold boxed releases of RedHat and Mandrake. My first installs were fueled by $20 boxed releases at Walmart. I was so bummed when they stopped. But I could send away for Ubuntu releases on a CD for free.

Thanks to Trump, there appears to be some initiatives in Europe for governments to switch to open source. It seems they want to try and get out of relying on US companies for their technology. That would make a large jump in the user base.

They have tried before, and not had the best luck in dropping US vendors. Things seem to run out of steam at some point and they switch back. It will be interesting to see if things stick more this time.

I’m pulling for them to succeed.

I briefly looked at LFS with the thought to try it a long time ago. No… Just no…

That’s not an OS, that is a psychotic break with reality. Fortunately, you can take shots for it…

I did Gentoo for a bit also. Ain’t enough hours in the day…

Despite not being a gamer myself, Gamers are or should be a hotly contested demographic for Linux to chase and capture. And thanks to Steam, there is a shift happening as gaming gets easier.

Real men and women run Slack. Tarballs Yum!

To head off the zealots-- ./././

My first guess is the author is aggregating the numbers from either the distros download data directly or they are getting the numbers from some place like Distro Watch. You can even get a crude sense of the increase in new users if you hang out in a distro help forum. I check the r/Fedora sub on reddit a few times a week, (I run Fedora 42 BTW), and there has been enough of an increase in new users posting “OMG, I just ditched Windows and look at my shiny new Gnome/KDE desktop!” to be annoying to some people. It can be hard to find those posts from people looking for help with a problem sometimes.

What no one can say is just how long those shiny new users will stick with Linux or run back to Windows at a later date. My gut feeling is, if half of this new 5% sticks it’s a major, major victory for all the distros.