That’s a really great point and another reason I’ve really enjoyed the Garmin experience – Garmin doesn’t try to sell your own data back to you.
Getting anything more than the absolute most basic of real time data out of a Fitbit requires an annual subscription. With Garmin, it’s just there.
Fitbit is owned by Google and has the same policy of not repairing cracked screens.
I owned a Sense 2 and was in a bicycle crash. Screen hit the pavement and shattered. Absolutely no options from Fitibit/Google to get it repaired.
I switched to Garmin and couldn’t be happier.
A 2.4 will be better than an Ender 3, but there are better options out there. The flying gantry is a solution in search of a problem, the gantry is heavy and not particularly rigid, Voron toolheads don’t cool particularly well, the rigid bed mounting is a recipe for bed taco, etc.
Which isn’t to say that V2s are bad printers – they can turn out great prints. But if you’re starting fresh today, I’d seriously consider any number of printers over it.
If you want to stay within the Voron ecosystem for whatever reason, the Trident’s a better design. It still lacks things like kinematic bed mounting that are standard fair on other designs today, though. I’d stay away from Tap on any of them – I’m still baffled that thing gets promoted as being a good idea.
In terms of bang for your buck, it’s incredibly difficult to beat the VzBot kits. It’ll be a less expensive and more capable machine than a V2.4. There are panels available to enclose it. I don’t love the Z stage on it, but I can overlook it given the value the rest of the printer gets you.
The Annex K3 is an absolutely killer little machine, but is only 180x180 build volume. The small build volume is free rigidity, though, and K3s can be made true high temp capable with less relative effort than a lot of printers. I’m not as big a fan of the larger Annex printers (K1/K2), personally.
The Rat Rig v-Core was probably the best value CoreXY before the VzBot kits came around. Enclosing them is more of a challenge due to all the PETG parts, though. The EVA toolhead provides a ton of flexibility for mixing and matching parts, if that’s your thing.
In terms of take it out of the box and print, nothing beats the Bambu X1 and P1P. They’re great units. They’re a closed ecosystem though, and not modification friendly if that’s what you want.
My main workhorse printer’s a Railcore II. Great machine, but the design’s aging and I generally wouldn’t recommend a new build today outside of a few very specific applications. It was cutting edge when the design was released in 2018, but, as with the 2.4, the wider community has learned a lot since then about fundamental printer design and there are better options now.
Restricts Freedom to Use the Software
I’ve always found this particular one somewhat frustrating. It’s essentially the intolerance paradox repackaged into a software licensing analog:
“You are restricting the freedom of users by taking away their ability to close the code and restrict the freedom of other users!”
It’s always read very “I got mine” to me.
That said, while I lean copyleft, I also don’t find just barring commercial use entirely interesting. The goal is to ensure source code remains available to users; I think there are better ways of addressing that than trying to delineate and exclude commercial use.
This AI ruling is also actually completely in-line with existing precedent from the photography world.
The US Copyright Office has previously ruled that a photograph taken by a non-human (in this case, a monkey) is not copyrightable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute