Is there an alternative to cura the 3D print slicer while the devs sort themselves out?

About a year ago,I bought a 3D printer and ran up some gcode files for it without much issue. I never printed much. Now I'm trying to print again, and I can't get file operations functional in Cura 4.8.0 or 5.0.0

I tried AppImages. Cura-5.0.0 has the AppImage compiled against Qt-6.x. IME, not all Appimages are 100% leakproof, so that could be an issue. Apparently I can drag & drop to open files, File/Open-recent also works, but save/export certainly don't. I can't even see the path.

The github issues page is all angry noises and no solutions.

There's no slackbuild on slackbuilds.org. I even fired up my recently resurrected Win7 VM but that's puking over some missing dll. I haven't chased a windows bug in over 15 years. Win 7 is probably too old. The source code lists 36 dependencies!

Typical me: Confusing everyone.

Before rabbiting on about the windows error, I should have said something like

I did grab the Cura source code but it lists 36 dependencies! No wonder people build AppImages.

I don't have a solution, but I am interested in this since I am looking to get a 3D printer in a month or so. Would it be possible to build Qt 6 locally and use LD_LIBRARY_PATH or some other similar solution at runtime to get the AppImage to see it?

As an alternative to Cura, there is Prusa Slicer.

https://www.prusa3d.com/page/prusaslicer_424/

Prusa Slicer has a lot of profiles for 3rd party printers, and you can configure your own custom profile.
They have an AppImage and its not too terrible to build from source if you want to.

You marked this as solved. For my and others' sake, could you share what the solution was?

Thanks for the replies. Cura looks next to impossible to build, although I'm making progress. It's a game of 'whack-a-mole' on the errors till they run out.

@montagdude:QT6 is proprietary, meaning you pay for it!.

When your software is a nightmare, you build an appimage to keep the nightmare in there and not having it mix with your system. Unfortunately things that are left out of the appimage get searched for in your system, hence the errors. To answer your questions, no I can't build QT6 without paying, and no, the AppImage has it's own LD_Library_Path. It's kinda the other way around than what you suggest; What goes on inside the Appimage should stay inside the Appimage.

Then I tried to get clever. I went to the Anycubic site, and under 'support' I found windows & MacOS Slicer programs with a completely different version number. I had recently resurrrected VirtualBox and installed Windows 7 so I intended to get it going there. But 3 versions of Cura later in Windows, none have my printer's profile except the one which crashes out with a video error on startup. I did get to read fonts upside down, reminding me why I ran away from windows and stayed away.

Yes, Yes I know windows 7 is way past EOL. But it runs inside the 3GB of ram I can allocate to a VM on this sucky 10 year old laptop. Windows 7 regularly reminds me "Really, I should be dead..." so I tell it to shut up & keep going. I've a PC upgrade due for delivery soon, with new software nightmares awaiting - AMD CPU & GPU, UEFI.

@bw42: Thanks for your reply. I had tried Slic3r and got this video error which would be intriguing & interesting except I have a PC upgrade due this week (or next month in Irish time). So I grabbed Prusa Slicer, which I didn't know about. It alone actually works after a fashion. I have to set up the printer, but it has some AnyCubic models, so I should manage that eventually. If it sits up, I can mark this solved.

Note to all Cura users: Don't update Cura if you can avoid it!

1 members found this post helpful.

Sorry - marking it solved first was a typo. My bad.

But Prusa Slicer has sliced me an .stl file, and that has solved the issue for me until I find out the file doesn't work. Apparently some but not all users are having issues with Cura AppImages.