My experience has been pretty similar. With Windows turning the invasive crap up to 11, I decided to try and jump to Linux. The catch has always been gaming. But, I have a Steam Deck and so have seen first hand how well Proton has been bridging that gap and finally decided to dip my toes back in. I installed Arch on a USB 3 thumbdrive and have been running my primary system that way for about a month now. Most everything has worked well. Though, with the selection of Arch, I accepted some level of slamming my head against a wall to get things how I want them. That’s more on me than Linux. Games have been running well (except for the input bug in Enshrouded with recent major update, that’s fixed now). I’ve had no issues with software, I was already using mostly FOSS anyway. It’s really been a lot of “it just works” all around.

I print these containers for my basement hydroponic plants.
My wife has also stolen several to use as traditional soil planters.

Building a 3D printer is easy. Getting the details right to build a great 3D printer is hard, as this is where most companies fail. Why?

Because 3d printers are becoming cheap commodities. Those little details cost money and most manufacturers aren’t willing to take the profit hit to do anything more than the bare minimum. It’s only ever going to get worse at the lower end of the cost spectrum and while higher end printers may get somewhat cheaper, most people won’t be able to afford that level of care. The majority of consumer level devices will continue to be just good enough to not get returned but always lacking in fit and finish.

Assuming this is the printer. It looks like it has both wired and wireless networking. Does it work over wired ethernet or does that fail as well?

Ya, my printer leaves a lot to be desired and I had a heck of a time getting even one to print cleanly. So, I didn’t want to have one fail and ruin the batch. I did print the last two I needed together, over night. Was running out of time and just went for it.
Each one was about 4.5 hours printing and 10-20 minutes of cleanup. These required a lot of supports. I did 24 in total.
But, they were a hit at the party, so it was worth it.

Ya, I’ve actually done that in the past. I printed and gave out a print in place bearing fidget toy. This model was a bit ambitious but it coming out pretty well. I also did Among Us ghost key-chains for Halloween one year. Turns out that my 3d printer is mostly just a toy maker for my kids.

While I’m a fan of Kali, some work environments see anything Kali related and go full “zomg! WTF!” Mode. Even in less restrictive environments, it’s often easier to just go with the flow and avoid making life harder for the security folks, without a good reason.

For me, completely disabling retraction helped out a ton. It went from a stringy mess to mostly clean prints. Other than that, slow speeds and finding the right temperature for my printer/filament got my prints pretty nice.

I think the issue is that the “code to shape” way of designing things is just different than the CAD way of doing things. I’m the opposite of the OP in that several of the designs I have created from scratch, I have done using OpenSCAD specifically because that is the way my brain works,. I can use OpenSCAD and just math my way to most of the shapes I want (I love me some parabolic curves). There is also a fairly robust community of people sharing libraries for it, so I can leverage those to do complex stuff, without having to figure it out myself. I also find CAD programs confusing, though that’s likely down to a lack of experience. I have FreeCAD installed and some day I might actually learn to use it, but math and code is so comfy.