Might be a nice printer; I'll never know

Bambu Lab Software Bambu Studio
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Edit: ok, this is at least partially my own fault. I saw a download buttons for Windows and thought that meant pretty much any Windows would do. I missed the grey on grey text that specified only Windows 10+ was supported. I’m still very unhappy at how the ticket system failed, and the lack of Windows 7 or real linux support, but I’ve taken a deep breath and I can get this to work.
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Worst product experience of my life. I’m literally angry.

Printer (X1C pro, $2000) came yesterday. After some fussing I got it together and managed to print Benchy on the 2nd try (1st attempt was spaghetti). Ok, not great, but hey.

Today I tried to do actual work with the printer. Nope. Bambu Slicer doesn’t work.

First I tried the Linux appimage, because I’m a linux shop. Nope. It wants a specific version of glibc and for various reasons I can’t upgrade my linux system to match. No instructions on how to get and use a local copy of glibc, no explanation for why a supposedly self-contained appimage cares anyway. No path forward there. Next I tried running the .exe under WINE. It comes up, but it doesn’t see the printer online. Oh, I need to use the Home tab to login.

The Home tab shows a completely blank screen. No way to log in. So no printer can be connected. Why I need that I don’t know; the printer is on my local network. But nope.

Ok, plan B. I’d expected trouble since linux was unsupported. So I dusted off my old Windows 7 machine, and installed the slicer .exe.

Crashes immediately on startup.

Now I’m fuming because I’d at least expected that to work. I stumble over to the Bambu support site; I want a human to talk to because for this price I expect that. Nope. So I try to submit a ticket. I know this is hopeless; if an app crashes on startup there’s something fundamentally wrong; maybe it was never tested on Windows 7. But it’s all I’ve got.

The ticket webpage tries everything it can to get you to give up. It demands pictures. Of what, the crash screen? But the kicker was that it demands a log file from Bambu Studio, and helpfully tells you how to get Bambu Studio to give you one. Except the app crashes on startup. I root around in Program Filws/Bambu Studio, where I expect to see a log directory. There isn’t one. It didn’t get as far as creating a log file.

I try to fake a log file with some text in it and submit that. Nope, it knows that’s not a Bambu Studio log file.

$2000 for a printer and you can’t even submit a support ticket when it fails out of the box.

Not happy.

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Option a) Orca Slicer
Option b) VMWare Player with Windows 10 VM on Linux host

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Looks to me like you went into a YMMV situation without acknowledging it’s a YMMV situation.

Windows 10 (64-bit)+
macOS 10.15+

:man_shrugging:

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Looks like Bambu Studio required Windows 10 and above.

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Looks to me like the reference to Windows 10 was in a pale grey on gray image that my old eyes didn’t actually notice until I looked twice at the image you sent… sigh. The installer should have failed to run on Windows 7 if it wasn’t going to work; instead it wasted my time.

Well, I’m not going to install Windows 10 natively. I’ll wait until they support Linux for real (and don’t tie it to anything more specific than posix because there’s no reason for a math package like a slicer to care.) or I can try the VM idea. Thanks.

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I would give Orca Slicer a go first, it’s a fork of Bambu Studio and supports Linux, unless that was the app image you were referring to earlier that you tried?

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I have a lot of respect for the technical community that uses linux as a primary OS–dealing with these types of challenges is normal isn’t it? :laughing: . I second overflow’s idea to try Orca Slicer (which is what some Windows users use in preference over Bambu Studio to be honest) or a VM with Windows 10

I’m sure you have the technical skills to make this work and could contribute by writing a using P1P/X1C with Linux distro article to help others! It’s not a boat anchor since you were able to print benchy :smiley:

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GitHub - SoftFever/OrcaSlicer: G-code generator for 3D printers (Bambu, Prusa, Voron, VzBot, RatRig, Creality, etc.)

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I’m bright enough - but my eyes are old and I missed the grey on grey print that mentioned Windows 10. But the download button that just said “Windows” was nice and clear. And the installer didn’t say a peep about the OS version being wrong.

It doesn’t help that as far as I’m concerned, the last release of Windows was 7. I briefly tried Vista and that was it, I moved to Linux and never looked back.

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Maybe you can to try the orca slicer.

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I can’t see Orca Slicer working as it’s based off the original Bambu Slicer.

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It’s not the slicer that’s the issue. It’s the way Bambu created it’s appimage for Linux that the op is having issues with. That being said libc should be part of any standard distro… :person_shrugging: hard to say without know what the original error was. I mean worst case one could always just compile from source instead of using the Appimage.

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I got the same glibc error that I’m pretty sure you got. As suspected, the issue is Bambu created the AppImage for very new Linux systems. I’m running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and could not run Bambu slicer. It looks like it wants a minimum version of 2.32 and I only have version 2.31 installed (you can check your version with “ldd --version”).

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So again, I would recommend the Orca Slicer. I tried the Orca Slicer appimage on my Ubuntu system and it ran fine.

We should also probably ask Bambu to lower their libc dependencies for their appimage build especially considering Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is still in active support until April 2025.

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Yup. I’m just wondering what they’re doing in there that cares which version of glibc is around. memcpy is memcpy, cos is cos, portable code shouldn’t know or care about a version of the runtime. I’ve written millions of lines of C and C++ in my day and nothing I did knew or cared about this. Oh well, just another AppImage mystery.

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This all seems like a silly thing to get “angry” about.

User is complaining about not being able to use a version of windows that went EOL 3 years ago? Why would they support an OS that is EOL?

The whole " But I’m a linux guy bend to my will" thing is also silly.

You have some clear options here.

  1. Get a new windows computer
  2. Run windows in a VM on your Linux box.
  3. Return/resale the printer.

None of this is a “Bambu Labs” issue, this is “a you” issue.
.

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Looks like I’m too late to edit or delete this post, so I’ll amend it here by saying that I installed Orcaslicer on linux and life is vastly better. The only thing I don’t have working is the printer’s live camera feed and I don’t need that.

The printer itself works well with PLA - I haven’t gotten PETG to work yet, but for immediate projects I don’t need it. I can’t say enough good things about Orca and I will be contributing a donation to that project.

As a software engineer I’ll continue to maintain that Bambu’s app just doesn’t cut it. If it’s not going to work on Windows 7 the installer should stop and say so. Linux support should be present and stable out of the box - Orca manages it and without any strange library dependencies. It’s obvious that Bambu is yet another hardware company that knows how to build hardware but finds software mysterious. Maybe they should just redistribute Orca and call it done - it’s clearly The Right Thing for this printer.

But the printer itself seems really solid.

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It’s as simple as: when they built the software, that was the version of libc which was installed and linked against. Software linked against a specific version of glibc is compatible with anything greater than or equal the linked version. For more detail search for “How the GNU C Library Handles Backward Compatibility”. I would link it, but my account is presumably too new to do so.

Being a 100% Linux software shop, I’m somewhat surprised you haven’t, at the very least, run into this in the past. You might request they link the appimage against an older glibc. Typically this usually just means using an appropriately dated build environment. Old enough to have an old glibc, but new enough to have your other dependencies available.)

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Odd that you spend that much without reading the requirements for running the software. I’d never spend money on something like this without doing some researching

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It’s rather unfair to expect anybody to deliver software today that targets an OS that went EoS over 3 years ago.

Plus, it’s not like these requirements weren’t well documented and published.

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First off, this is not a $2000 printer, more like $1500+- depending on taxes, etc. Secondly, it’s not uncommon for any machine company to require a more modern operating system to use their “programming software”. I work in the CNC industry and again this is pretty much standard across all platforms. Grab a basic Windows 11 laptop from Best Buy, MicroCenter, Dell, any company that sells laptops. It seems the hold up here is you.