I have been a long time Prusaslicer user but lately I’m running into a limitation. Hole XY size compensation is a big missing feature which I have seen in Cura. Also Cura handles lithophanes really well.
I do not like the UI of Cura but do like the Prusaslicer one.
What slicer do you prefer?
cura seems to have a decent, user freindly setup. i use it when my creality software balks at certain filetype manipulations
Another bump for orca slicer. I use it daily for work and it’s an excellent slicer. The new plugin system is also sooo exciting for what is possible.
The alpha for Prusa slicer 3.0 is also really nice, and the pinning of common settings is really freaking nice, but until I can test it on non-Prusa machines, I’ll have to wait…
Orca
Orca slicer is where it’s at in my opinion
Orca is my preference. I had started with Cura, but had nonsensical random issues trying to run my Ender printer. Had short-term issues with Orca crashing and having display issues when I moved to Linux, but that appears to be fixed. Orca is back to being regularly maintained, and has plenty of great features. If you read about some new slicer features or techniques online that people are working on, Orca’s probably got it.
Ironically, Cura for some of the same reasons you list: I think everything derived from Slic3r is a dumpster fire of UX. Yes, I see Cura has started to lag behind. Yes, the visualization is nowhere near as smooth. And yes, every time I try Prusa Slicer/Orca Slicer I come running back to Cura. I will say that Orca seems the one to look for, as it’s trying to improve the situation of the aforementioned dumpster fire…
It’s not helping that the Orca profile for my printer must be straight up made by a competing company, because it makes my old Ender 3 look like the fastest thing on earth, while the Cura one is pretty much flawless.
I started out as with prusaslicer, but the functionality and workflow of orca is IMO far superior.
I installed Cura and it never gave me a reason to switch… until it started to get just impossible to keep it running. My take on Cura is “it’s a fine slicer, but a terrible program.”
I used to run it on a Raspberry Pi, but then they made it impossible to run on ARM. Gentoo abandoned it because Cura made it impossible to build reliably. I don’t remember what the issue I had on Arch (on x86_64, even) was, but it was a pain to even make it run there as well.
So I switched to Prusaslicer and it hasn’t given me a reason to change yet. I think Orca is kindof “Prusaslicer but with more bells, whistles, and gongs”, but I have yet to really need much more functionality than Prusaslicer offers. The bricklaying thing seems kinda cool, but I haven’t had a specific use for it. And most of what I print is very utilitarian rather than artistic, so if I tinker, it tends to be more with the model than the slicer settings. (Honestly, most of what I print is models I designed myself from scratch in OpenSCAD.)
I’ll go ahead and say prusa meets my needs and it is what I’m using on arch. Maybe I’ll try orca based on this thread. I don’t even understand your problem so I suspect you are a more sophisticated user!