Is it worth changing from Cura?

I’ve been using Cura as my slicer since I started 3D Printing a few years ago. It works well, and I am very familiar with its settings. Does Orca have any “must-have” features that Cura is lacking, such that I should switch?

I do most of my slicing (all of it, really) on my laptop, which runs a version of Linux that is a few years out of date. I am not able to run the latest versions of Luban, as it relies on some libraries that are out of date. One of the things I like about Cura is that it is available as an “AppImage”, that doesn’t have any external dependencies.

I like Cura but abandoned it because 2 reasons:

The “random” placement of the seam is/was the worst of all the slicers out there. Truly garbage, especially for large round objects.
There is/was no way to control the number of walls on bottom layer (only top layer).

Don’t know if these problems have been fixed but Prusaslicer and Orcaslicer don’t have them.

I was using the Orca Slicer (not the Snapmaker version) with my previous printer (Creality K1).

For my Artisan i changed back to Cura as it allows direct upload to the printer and not fiddling with USB drives (Snapmaker plusin is available in the Marketplace for free)
Orca from Snapmaker can do it as well, but you have to have Luban on your computer because it uses it “piggyback”.

I cannot confirm the issues reported by Rwide regarding seam or number of walls. For me Cura 5.9.0 works as i expect it.
Orca does have some advantages if it comes to clearness, but you could also the tabbed-settings plugin which makes it easier to scroll through the tons of options in profiles .

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I’ve been playing with Cura some since Luban was ‘based’ on Cura. There are things in Luban that I haven’t figured out in Cura yet. Now, is Luban going to Orca coding? Just curious where this is going.

Luban is based on a 4.x version of Cura and it’s heavily modified by Snapmaker, maybe the reason why some features are not in Luban.

Orca is not going to replace Luban. Snapmaker is giving people an alternative Application who want to have more control over 3D printing.

Orca doesn’t have any capacity for Laser or CNC, for these Orca cannot be the successor.

I prefer to wait and see what the advantages of Orca will be because I know Cura well, its countless functions :sweat_smile:, and its advantages like saving in 3mf format and keeping all the parameters of the piece to be able to reopen it. which, according to my latest information, most slicers do not do and which is essential for me.