As always, read the fine print… details matter!!! Thanks for post this.
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I don’t care about Handy, I have other options.
Don’t care about “makerworld incentives” (whatever that is).
Laser cutting on my print bed… Mama taught me not to burn things in the house. Likewise laser cutting belongs in the shop along with its smoke and dirty residue, not my print bed in my office.
That flow chart and check list seems to be intentionally misleading. Stating "Fully off-grid printer control and firmware updates right next to “3rd-Party applications” via developer mode with no Bambu Connect gatekeeper in sight… Its asking for more trouble from their once faithful evangelical customer base, unless its true and they are trying to make amends. If it isn’t true, they should be aware they are in a state of limbo with much of their power user customer base that got them where they are today, this could be the last straw.
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Maybe they did bend for dev mode. That only makes sense to disable laser for dev mode if you can control the printer without bambu connect via dev mode.
BUT:
"
Developer Mode (Optional): For advanced users of the X1, P1, A1, and A1 Mini who prefer full control over their network security, an option will be available to leave the MQTT channel, live stream, and FTP open.
"
This mentions for those of you that want full control over your network security but says nothing about allowing full control of your printer. It simply seems to open up MQTT, live stream, and FTP… No mention of printer control API access in dev mode.
After watching the CNC Kitchen video on the new printer… it is tempting to believe they enshittified their existing lineup specifically to make the new one look better when they advertised the offline features.
But I won’t be taking the risk and 2nd time.
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Especially when as Johnny_bit pointed out that 2 of the functions that would tempt some people into getting this are not available in off-line mode. I wonder if it means if you got the laser you can’t even go into dev mode, or if the laser functions are not available when in dev mode or it kicks you out of dev mode?
Auto-fire extinguisher… ships with 500 lb halon replacement bottle… 
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Coming back to check on this 2 weeks later and it looks like there’s still no Linux version. 
Backreading a bit there seems to be a lot of discussion about whether or not Bambu Lab should be “forced” to support Linux considering (desktop) Linux users are a minority, and I just wanted to share my own perspective on this!
I feel like a lot of Linux users understand that desktop Linux doesn’t have a ton of market share (although I do think there is significant overlap with the 3D printing community, who also likes to tinker!), and in my experience everyone in the community seems more than willing to go out of their way to put in the work to tinker and make things compatible (porting, packaging, troubleshooting, helping each other out, etc.).
What bothers me is when a company like Bambu Lab goes out of their way to prevent this by forcing everyone to use Connect, and also seemingly can’t be bothered to release a version of Connect for Linux. Like, either provide an official way or let us make something ourselves, yeah? 
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone’s already making their own unofficial version of Connect for Linux. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Bambu Lab decided to expend even more effort trying to break that if/when it does pop up than it would take to just provide an official version of Connect for Linux!!!
I guess we’ll see? But right now imo the attitude feels less like “we’re busy right now, build it yourself” (which they did with Bambu Studio 2.0.0 today! and it took maybe an hour or two for community maintainers to package it) and more like “we’re busy, go away”.
As someone with two printers that are both less than 6 months old, that makes me feel bad! I’m not trying to be difficult here, I’d be happy with either an official or an unofficial solution, it just feels like I’ve been offered neither! And I wish they hadn’t gone about it this way because it all seems so unnecessary! 
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You would think they would at least put out a “we’re working on it” statement. There is a reason people on Linux variaints have been using it. Because the distro and plugin has been (mostly) available if I understand correctly. I am a windows user but I hope that once they catch their breath after the current line release Linux versions will follow.
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Edit: on second thought, I don’t want to get in trouble for trying to reverse engineer Connect but I do wish they would at least give a status update or something!
The printer control is done via MQTT topics - the dev mode just doesn’t require messages on being signed by BLs convoluted authorization system (and maybe also encrypts FTP/RTSP). Of course, all we know about this is what we sniffed and reverse engineered as BL never released the control specs so there might as well be some APIs that we’re not aware of, which they’ll keep for themselves when the dev mode is on - this remains to be seen (and is one of the main reasons why I’m not FW updating my printers).
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The real irony is that they’ve built that half-thought monstrosity in Electron - you know, an SDK whose main advertised feature and a tag-line is: Build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. There are about 0 reasons not to release it for Linux as well as it literally requires no effort (except maybe post-release support)… Then again, there are about 0 reasons for its existence in the first place, alas…
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I was probably near the center of whatever it is you read so just to be sure it’s clear, I haven’t made an isolated argument that a private entity should be arbitrarily forced to do anything.
The argument includes some nuance, i.e. that if they’re going to advertise compatibility with it, it works fine out of the box while they’re selling a device for years, you should not be dropping or compromising support (even temporarily). Maybe a change in policy like that could be defended with a lot of advance notice, and after removing anything that mentions or implies compatibility.
^ If this link and other information demonstrating no compatibility issues weren’t there (and the 3rd party Orca Slicer option of course), I’d probably be in some Prusa-focused community right now.
In situations like this you often hear things like “you should’ve done your research”, but that falls on deaf ears if the advertising was misleading. It’s not the customer’s fault if marketing was full of it. 
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Forced? Hell no… they should not forced to do anything they don’t want to do. But, since they have explicitly stated
- Linux: Under Development
Bambu Connect (beta) | Bambu Lab Wiki
they should be forced to make it available in a reasonable time frame. 
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Probably can’t support linux, there isn’t any way for the plug-in to verify the signature of the caller.
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It’s just an electron app. They’ve obfuscated the code but that’s it. I’m like 50/50 that the reason we don’t have a Linux version yet is because they’re still trying to figure out how to obfuscate it even more.
I’ve looked at it and (despite their best efforts to make it as difficult as possible) it would honestly probably take me less time to just make my own version than it’s taken them to not build a Linux version, but I shouldn’t have to do that.
It’s honestly baffling and I have no idea why they decided to go about it this way.
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Ah ok, I thought you were talking about something else. Yes, it should just run. Probably does under wine. 
It didn’t when I tried it but it’s entirely possible that I did it wrong! I guess I’ll give it another go if they continue to not publish a Linux build, and if that doesn’t work I might just port Connect myself. 
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Call us tin hat wearing, overacting, mislead, ill-informed, ignorant, etc for taking our printers offline and not embracing these firmware “security updates”… Very next highest cost flagship printer has a bug that stops in the middle of a print for detecting itself as not running certified firmware.
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It’s not actually a bug, rather an instruction coded in post January 16th firmware releases…call it how you want: $€curity patch, authentication patch…whatever… Funny thing is that Bambu’s PR girlie has said that much (and very clear) in The Verge article, that with the new printer line comes the (bs) security firmware patch pre-installed … The article was published long before the launch of the H2D…and H2D is considered as 2nd gen Bambu printers…thus…
Also, from Bambu’s blog:
[btw, haven’t put my tinfoil hat on…yet…hoping we do not have to get to that point that soon…though it might come to that point, sooner than later] 
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It should be worth noting this is a known bug on the H2D/AMS2 supposedly under the same reddit post it was pulled from.
Still not settling that this was the warning message that appeared. Checking a box about an AMS blacklist check can help avoid the issue - again from the same reddit page.
Thanks for sharing.
Bug triggering it or not, the fact that this error even exists is now a “known problem”. Straight up canceling a print job / halting to function (18 hours in on a 24hour print for this user) for any reason other than mechanical damage or work-piece breaking loose from the bed is appalling and a bad omen of whats to come from Bambu. This is a perfect example of why my x1c is offline and on older firmware, it won’t stop doing what I tell it to do and what I paid full price for it to do unless it really should for reasons like print failure or mechanical damage, no sneaky software gatekeepers or proprietary lock downs.
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