I am wondering why there is no open framework for laser printing.
There are a few parts that would have to be made out of sheet metal. The sides could be stamped for the same pattern. You then need a back and a cross section. One could theoretically make them from ABS, but ABS gets brittle with heat and the sides will shatter.
One side of the printer is dedicated to running an ARM SOC. I’m not sure if the Arduino is up to the task, but it will need to control 3 motors, initiate a heating sequence, start a rasterizing laser, interpret a print job, communicate over network and USB, and monitor a bunch of sensors.
The hardest parts will be obtaining print cartridges, rollers, and fusers. Designing a standard to run off a certain vendor’s hardware will be a pile of issues, and nobody will just start manufacturing hardware for a handful of hobbyist printers.
Everything else is 3d printing, springs, and screws.
2d printers need to be a lot more precise. 300dpi means each dot is placed with less than a tenth of a mm, and that’s not even particularly impressive for a 2d printer. 3d printers get away with a lot more slop than that.
That’s only talking about greyscale. Color requires precise alignment of the cartridges for at least 4 base colors (higher end photo printers have even more) , and the mix of those colors must be carefully controlled to get accurate output.
Yeah, that is one of the big problems I was considering. Even monochrome at 300 DPI would be a problem. The imaging array and drum would need to be manufactured separately and installed as whole unit.
At least it only needs to be precise if the register is adjustable. You would need some tiny stepper motors right? I’m not familiar with how register is adjusted on desktop printers, but I know it can be.
Well, cartridges, rollers, and fusers are the important bits that can’t easily be manufactured by hand. And that’s a big part of the price of the printer.
You can’t really make them cheaper than mass-manufacture, and laser printers are already almost bulletproof from my experience.
My cheap old 3D printer requires constant fiddling before and after every print, yet still fails probably half the time. I avoid printing things sometimes just because I don’t want to deal with it.
I would still agree with you 100%. I hate my HP printer so much.
That can be applied to most hobbies in general. Not using an automated coffee machine? Time worth nothing. Cooking rather buying takeout? Building your own pc rather than buying prebuilt? Drawing rather than generating with AI? Time worth nothing, that’s why.
To be frank I went away from Gentoo for much the same reason. And the constant compilation. I only used it once after that for a small project where I needed to minimise what actually lands in the OS.
Just the little things, really. App compatibility, xbps not having too many packages, issues with Musl, GRUB not loading on the LiveUSB, desktop/WM selection, and also I don’t like the way Runit works. I could make it work if I needed to, but overall it just seems like too much effort.
As an Arch User who keeps hearing about OpenSUSE being a more stable rolling release…mind going into it a bit more? I’m happy on my system, mind, but idk, could be I’m missing out on something big for not making the jump. If nothing else, I’ll know my options
That’s just a snapshot. What NixOS allows you to create configuration that will deploy your OS configured the way you like, possibly post it on places like GitHub deeply a new machine confused the exact same way.
BTRFS and ZFS filesystems offer lightweight snapshots. So you can save the state of the filesystem and restore it. It is often integrated with the package manager and a snapshot is involved before you make change.
NixOS works differently. You have a configuration file, and each time you make change to it NixOS rebuilds itself to its specification from scratch (you might assume it would be a lengthy process, but because of caching only things that are rebuilt are things that you are changing).
This means that things like for example squeezing from KDE to Gnome or X11 to Wayland aren’t scary to try and you can easily revert things back, your home directory won’t be touched.
Also those things aren’t exclusive you can use BTRFS and ZFS on NixOS to and enjoy their benefits.
Yeah, you can if you plan well enough (typically. What I’m trying to illustrate is that this works by taking a snapshot of the disk in time. It’s like keeping a working copy of your system on your disk to be able to revert to.
While with NixOS you work with a “recipe” how your system is supposed to be configured. It is much lighter. It is declarative, you change the recipe and get what you described, you change configuration and all packages which you did not mention and are not used by anything are gone. If you update your system you can use the same configuration on it
The thing is that using can still get BTRFS or ZFS and use it to have snapshots too (for example your home directory)
Nah man, 3 months ago i had fedora 38 btrfs, timeshift refused to work because subvolumes wasn’t done, but i installed everything in auto gui mode, i did them by the manual after installation, timeshift started working just fine, a week further update to fedora 39 came, i updated, everything broke because of subvolumes, i loaded fedora recovery mode from grub, tried to roll back with timeshift btrfs, it rolled back to 38 but everything was still broke, and more over, whole ssd with this installation became locked, had to recover data from completely locked up ssd, in the middle of the process it locked even further, so i couldn’t even copy some files when disk was connected as external
NixOS ended up disappointing me a fair bit. I just tried it recently and the KDE support seems very rough so far, or at least I couldn’t find good answers to how to configure it and theme it.
One of the main draw of NixOs is the reproducibility of builds, meaning that redoing the build will provide the exact same output each time, so Nix encourages you to make configuration changes through the package manager. I’ve mostly overcome my theming woes with home-manager now, but this comment was speaking to a little wrinkle I had when I was trying to learn and take advantage of the OS’s features as best I could.
The main configuration handles configuration of the system, home manager project was created to bring similar functionality for the user home directory. That’s where the name comes from.
Home manager also works great when using Nix on other systems to manage for files, for example on OS X.
When the windows update bricked my OS I sighed in pure relief as I could finally stop using windows forever. As an added bonus I didn’t lose any work because the drive was fully accessible to arch… after windows said it had encrypted the drive.
Absolute trash operating system and I have zero regrets leaving.
I very much understand your pain, my drive died mid-year while I was at university, I just cleaned it up and added it to a virtual machine with win10 to finish projects with the windows based programs.
Worked surprisingly well. I used virtual machine manager on arch (and now endeavour, I can’t stop distro hopping but I’ve stayed on endeavour the longest)
Honestly who NEEDS a printer anymore? We’ve moved on from printing out driving directions from MapQuest and burning our own DVD collections. We should ditch home printers and only use online printing services whenever you want something physical so it’s made nicely by someone who knows what they’re doing.
It can still be nice to have one so you can print out more pages in parallel than you have space on your screen and using a pen to annotate a document.
If it takes too long to load the EFI binaries, that might be BIOS setup issue. Have you tried other filesystems except FAT32 for the EFI partition? I’ve had luck with just FAT (FAT16) on some rigs that just refused to read FAT32 (still don’t know why).
Also, make sure the drives are in AHCI mode. Though this is mostly the default nowadays, I’ve seen weird BIOSes that defaulted to IDE mode.
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