Bambu projects can be easily opened in Orca and vise versa. You may see a bunch of error messages warning about extraneous parameters but I’ve never had an occasion where that interfered with printing the model.
I should mention that early on, I used to switch back and forth between BS and Orca trying to figure out which one had any advantages. It was two things that Bambu did in 2023 that made me switch permanently to Orca. First, the force-feeding of promotional page for MakerWorld. I don’t begrudge a company to promote themselves, I absolutely will NOT accept a company force-feeding advertising that I have to click past. Orca allows you to simply offers up the option to load in the Prepare tab if you so choose, bambu never offered that option.
The second item was that once I started to use Orca’s baked-in calibration tools that BS doesn’t have, I found myself opening BS less frequently. Eventually I decided to leave BS installed but change Orca to my default 3MF program.
This last round of anti-customer moves by Bambu was the last straw. I’ve removed BS from all my machines precisely to protect myself against an inadvertent click and potentially forcing a reload of BambuSource.dll library which I suspect Bambu will sabotage next.
Let me address both of these points. In its current form and from the very beginning, Orca has always peacefully coexisted on the same machine as BS. The stated goal of SoftFever was never to displace BS but rather to enhance it. Bambu even borrowed some of those enhancements and thanked the SoftFever developers. However, one could surmise that this may have bruised their egos, and it raises the question of whether that was a contributing factor to their efforts to “control” third-party apps. As I mentioned earlier, my transition from BS to Orca was gradual. However, for the moment, until Bambu follows through with their threats to deprecate third-party access—despite their gaslighting to the contrary—it sounds like neither of you has actually tried loading Orca on your machines to judge for yourselves. Don’t take my word for it, but if you want to see what you’re missing, do it now before Bambu pisses in the punchbowl.
Just to show and illustration of the two. These are examples of their preferences pages side by side from 2023.
Here’s the preferences page today. There are so many features it no longer fits onscreen, it now requires a scrollbar to view them all and that is only the preferences, there’s a lot more features and controls that Orca brought to the slicer such as scarf joints and advanced seam painting.
Here was a thread from 2023 just showing how quickly Orca Lapped Bambu Studio in quality of life features. The original post here about mouse wheel was just the tip of the iceberg