I’m wanting to move my main machine over to Linux, but I’ve heard mixed things about Orca Slicer working with Linux. Can anyone give any advice on either having it work or a Linux alternative with similar functionality?
Prusa and Cura are available on flathub and work fine. AFAIK Orca isn’t in the main repo but the flatpak is on their github and works fine for me too.
Orca works great on Debian 13 for me (I installed it as a Flatpak)
Orca on Archlinux user here. Its perfect.
What kind of hack-trash distro are you hearing about problems from?
I use Orca Slicer all the time on my Debian machine. Works great!
Orca as a flatpak/AppImage works without any issues here.(Debian 13, Fedora 43) There is also a LinuxServer.io version which I tend to run on my server and simply use a browser.
Been using Orca on Debian 12/13 for a while now and it’s been smooth sailing
I’ve been using orca on Linux mint for the past two years without any issues. I used prusa slicer before, but I much prefer how settings are managed in orca. Prusa slicer feels like they stopped giving a shit 20 years ago, it feels so horrifyingly ancient to use.
PrusaSlicer still works on my 2012 Asus laptop on Ubuntu 22. Use it weekly.
Prusa also works on my nixos 25 machine.
Almost definitely gonna be fine.
Cura publishes nice Appimages
I haven’t printed anything since I made the permanent leap a few months ago. I got Prusa configured the same way from my windows drive in like 5 minutes, including finding and installing it. And I don’t even use a Prusa printer, nor an FDM. It’s literally the goat.
Orca works just fine on Linux, probably even better than on Windows/macOS, which are a slightly neglected platforms from a dev’s perspective.
This is my experience. I do CAD in Windows, but Orcaslicer only works properly in Linux. On Windows, it tends to crash when I tell it to generate gcode for anything but the smallest prints.
Just as well, really. It reminds me to reboot, so I haven’t tried to fix it.
My experience with Orca on Windows is the same. Any complex model causes bedshitting, and I’ve tried basically all of the solutions suggested on their issue tracker. I had mild success with affinity tweaking (ie forcing the slicer to only use real cores. not hyperthreads) but it’s still hitting a ceiling.
At home where I’m running linux, Orca is perfect.
I’ve had no problems with Orca Slicer. Bambu Labs tries to crash the entire time it is open.
Yeah something is fucky in this release of BBUslicer, it usually opens my file, but will sometimes crash once or twice first. Unfortunately, Bambu P1S so no Orca for me (EndeavourOS / Arch derivative)
I’m exclusively on linux, and I’m using PrusaSlicer. It does what I need, and it integrates well with my prusa printer.
I did sniff around, in the name of science, looking at other slicers to see what they offered, but I found no reason to try anything else for now.
Had zero problems with orca.
It depends on your distro. I have an AnyCubic printer and have to use their derivative of Orca. It only supports Ubuntu 24.04, so I run it in a VM when I need it. There are some weird GTK things with it too. But still functional.
I have an AnyCubic printer and have to use their derivative of Orca.
What printer is that? I also have an anycubic printer, and before I flashed it with klipper it worked just fine with regular plain orca slicer.
Orca slicer works okay, but I have the newer Kobra 3 Max and it doesn’t come with the printer profile as of yet. And I still have to use the AnycubicSlicer Next suite to do any remote control. And trying to run it under CachyOS had a lot of visual problems (the Workbench tab shows nothing at all). The command line output is line after line of GTK errors.
By the license, I think they should be obligated to release the source, so if they do that maybe I can help make it less terrible (or at least reverse engineer the remote control protocol).
