Basically title, but I can provide some information.
I'm looking to spend no more than $300 or so. I'm not well versed in different filaments (I'll be honest, I know nothing) or really anything about 3d printing, but I want to be able to print cup holders for someone I know whose vehicle has none, I imagine heat resistance and strength would be important there. I also do robotics now and would like to be able to make my own small robot chassis and parts. I'm also a Linux user and like FOSS, which I believe is fairly compatible with 3d printing, so I would like to find a printer that doesn't make me use proprietary software and that I can use with Fedora Linux without too much hassle. I know I'm new to this, and I know I'm in other hobbies where people post things like: "I want to spend no more than 6 dollars to get artificial superintelligence running on an Arduino Nano," so I hope this isn't that, and sorry if it is. Thanks in advance.
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I can't speak to the Linux piece, but for that price point ender 3 pro is hard to beat. Or the Bambu mini but im unsure if you need to use their software or if you can use any slicer. I'd imagine any slicer to be honest
I highly recommend Orca Slicer, it's forked from bamboo slicer (which is in turn forked from Prusa), so has their modern UI/ layout and natively, as well as natively support bamboo printers. If Bamboo's not your jam, it also plays very nicely with Klipper. As an added bonus, it regularly gets new features added or ported from the other slicers.
Bambu has their printer software available for all major platform. For Linux I think it was in the Arch extras or aur. I have used it from Linux and it has generally been a good experience.
If someone is an fdm newbie. The A1 series is hard to go wrong. Creality is great too. But it takes a lot more tweaking to get it where the bambu is out of the box. BIL got an ender last year and not had a good experience. I got an A1 this year and it's been a blast from the start. These are all anecdotes. But personal experience to consider.
The Ender 3 Pro looks good, but I am a bit worried about the DIY aspect of it. I normally like DIY stuff, but since I am new to 3d printing, I want to isolate the number of things I have to learn. Is it too hard to set up, and does everything you need (apart from filament) come in the box or will I need to get other things?
The Ender and creality are good systems. But as you said they do require a lot of tinkering. My very technically inclined brother-in-law got an Ender last year. And had a very bad time with it because of all the faffing about you had to do. Conversely this year I got an a1. And it's more or less been point and click. There's plenty of other technical stuff to get into with it. Such as filament types feeds and speeds and heats. Supports and infills. Which it also helps out quite a bit with. But there's more than enough to learn just picking it up
The best way I've heard that described is that for the Bambu stuff, you spend your time fiddling with the thing you want to print, not your printer.
I love my p1p (and it's several thousand hours and 100kg of filament into ownership and all I've had to do is clean the bedplate and replace a nozzle), and really wish there was anyone who was making an open-source printer that's as reliable and fiddle-free as this thing has been.
So far that's been my experience. I've done a number of very simple models in blender even. Sliced and printed them no problem. Every model I've downloaded has been just point and click for the most part. I was looking at getting an Ender myself at one point. But I've dealt with SLA printing in the past. And know how much the tinkering put me off of it. I still need to get my Mars printer functioning again. I'm having issues with anything sticking to the build plate. I just haven't had the time to really dick around with it
I have an Ender 3 Pro and spend more time with maintenance than actually using it. I’ve stopped using it because it isn’t worth my time. I just bought a Bambu A1 and am hoping for an easier time. It just came today so I haven’t set it up yet.