We had a Fedora booth at LinuxDays 2016 in Prague and one of our attractions was Miro Hrončok‘s 3D printer Lulzbot Mini. Because Miro was busy helping organize the conference he just left the printer at the booth and I had to set it up myself. And it really surprised me how easy it is to 3D print using Fedora. Basically what I had to do was:

installing Cura from the official repositories, plugging the printer into a USB (automatically connected due to Miro’s udev rules), starting Cura, choosing the model of the printer and material I’m going to print with, opening a file with the 3D model I wanted to print, hitting the “Print” button and watching the printer in action.

Fedora has been known to be the best OS for 3D printing already for some time, mainly due to the work of Miro (he packaged all the available open source software for 3D printing, prepared udev rules to automatically connect to 3D printers etc.), but I was still surprised how easy it is to 3D print with Fedora these days. It really took just a couple of minutes from a stock system to start of the actual printing. It’s almost as simple as printing on papers.

There is still room for improvements though. Some 3D printing apps (Cura Lulzbot Edition is one of them) are available in the official repositories of Fedora, but don’t have an appdata file, so they don’t show up in GNOME Software. And it would also be nice to have “3D Printing” category in GNOME Software, so that the software is more discoverable for users.