New and old apps on Flathub
3D Printing Slicers
I recently replaced my Flashforge Adventurer 3 printer that I had been using for a few years as my first printer with a BambuLab X1 Carbon, wanting a printer that was not a “project” so I could focus on modelling and printing. It’s an investment, but my partner convinced me that I was using the printer often enough to warrant it, and told me to look out for Black Friday sales, which I did.
The hardware-specific slicer, Bambu Studio, was available for Linux, but only as an AppImage, with many people reporting crashes on startup, non-working video live view, and other problems that the hardware maker tried to work-around by shipping separate AppImage variants for Ubuntu and Fedora.
After close to 150 patches to the upstream software (which, in hindsight, I could probably have avoided by compiling the C++ code with LLVM), I manage to “flatpak” the application and make it available on Flathub. It’s reached 3k installs in about a month, which is quite a bit for a niche piece of software.
Note that if you click the “Donate” button on the Flathub page, it will take you a page where you can feed my transformed fossil fuel addiction buy filament for repairs and printing perfectly fitting everyday items, rather than bulk importing them from the other side of the planet.
Preparing a Game Gear consoliser shell
I will continue to maintain the FlashPrint slicer for FlashForge printers, installed by nearly 15k users, although I enabled automated updates now, and will not be updating the release notes, which required manual intervention.
FlashForge have unfortunately never answered my queries about making this distribution of their software official (and fixing the crash when using a VPN…).
Rhythmbox
As I was updating the Rhythmbox Flatpak on Flathub, I realised that it just reached 250k installs, which puts the number of installations of those 3D printing slicers above into perspective.
The updated screenshot used on Flathub
Congratulations, and many thanks, to all the developers that keep on contributing to this very mature project, especially Jonathan Matthew who’s been maintaining the app since 2008.