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CrazyIvan wrote: Mon Nov 17, 2025 8:58 am I suggest you try Orca. My brief research indicates it has built-in profiles for the K1 and K1 Max (update: confirmed), and it claims to be a good fit for Klipper-based printers (Klipper is one of the firmwares which run FDM printers, Marlin being the other main one).

Cura is very old-school compared with Orca. I've not used it yet, but I will be soon (when I receive my Snapmaker U1, or perhaps before).

Personally I actually still like Cura a little bit over Orca. It's a close call and they both have their merits, but I still feel Cura far more productive, while the Orca is probably better for people who fancy submenus and prefer the process of 3D printing over the actual print. I'm trying to keep at least one Cura powered machine in the 'shop as long as possible, for a very good reason.

For the past two or three years I've been meticulously testing various filaments, which produce the finish and colour I appreciate. And sadly, many of these filaments do not work very well when printing ludicrous speeds the modern Klipper based printers do. With Cura, I get 96% of the problems solved either by adjusting printing speed, or printing temperature. Cura automatically adjusts the other speed & temp values accordingly. With Orca, though, you need to do the calibrations, calculations and adjust the volumetric flowrate to drop the speed, which is good of course but sadly no matter how many times I do those calibrations, the print quality is still rubbish compared to Cura prints. This is especially striking issue with Silk PLA filaments, which I use a lot.

I have worked around the problem by starting to test new materials for Orca-driven printers, and I have found a few pretty good alternatives, which print nicely after thorough calibrations. But I can't find exactly same colours from other makers' catalogues, and doing all the tests all over again seems a bit daft. Another issue is the arc fitting on Orca, which does not work quite as well as on Cura, IMO. I happen to print a lot of cylindrical objects, so this problem is quite visible.

Granted, there's probably something I'm doing wrong with Orca by default. But that's also my point. When I started using Cura the first time, I got a lot of productivity out of it alreday on day three. I have used Orca for about a year and a half now, but I think I'm still doing something very, very wrong with it. Despite all the hours I've watched and read tutorials. Then again, I'm also an old bloke, and perhaps a bit of a creature of habit?

Thanks for your input.

It makes me a bit nervous, because I don't think I'll get the choice with my U1 (when it arrives). It seems odd Orca doesn't automatically recalculate affected settings when you adjust speed (which I have done in Cura, to get better first layers).

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