ExtremeDullard

If you're new to Wayland as I am, you haven't failed to be frustrated by the greeter / Sway not sourcing any of the usual X or profile configuration files. In i3, you export your variables in .profile and they're set everywhere for the whole session. Not so in Sway.

That means if you have a custom PATH or some exported variable you would like to define session-wide - setting QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME so all QT apps use the correct theme in Gnome for instance - you can't. Not the usual way anyway.

Those variables are set if you run a terminal with the shell in login mode, if they're defined in /etc/profile or .profile, but not if you run the program directly in Sway, such as wofi / rofi for example, or any program that needs an environment variable that isn't set.

Here's how to set environment variables for the entire session in Sway:

• Choose a greeter that understands systemd's environment.d. Unfortunately, there aren't very many. GDM and Plasma are the only two that I know of that do.

• Define your environment variables in ~/.config/environment.d/envvars.conf. You can define them the usual way like in profile, including extending variables like $PATH, e.g.:

  QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct
  PATH=$PATH:/usr/games:~/scripts
  

• Either reboot for the changes to take effect, or run systemctl --user daemon-reload to get systemd to parse your file again, then log out and back in as with Xorg.

Unfortunately, simply logging out and back in without informing systemd of your changes isn't enough - which is why you need to reboot if you don't do the daemon-reload command.

That's it!

Not too obvious, and not great. But in fairness, it's no more confusing than the mess of shell and X configuration files that existed before systemd and Wayland. It's just that systemd and Wayland are an entirely different complete trainwreck that takes getting used to 😃

This is Sway running on my ARM64 laptop. It took some effort to get everything going just right in Wayland but now that it\s all setup, I really like it.

The one thing I miss in Sway / Waybar is the ability to bind mouse and scroll events to commands when they happen in the empty parts of the bar like in i3 / i3blocks. If anybody knows how to achieve that, I'd be extremely grateful!

The latest PrusaSlicer versions require OpenGL 3.2 and my machine only supports OpenGL 3.1.

Anybody knows if other slicers can generate gcode or bgcode files for Prusa printers? If so, which would you recommend?

See original problem here

So I played with all kinds of settings in PrusaSlicer. Nothing changed anything.

The only things that did improve the outcome some was:

• Forcing the letters to be printed first: then the letters are smooshed and bleed into the background instead of the other way round, which arguably looks better / more legible. Nothing to write home about though.

• Dropping the first layer's height to 0.1mm (the other layers are 0.2mm high): that improves the letters a bit.

• Dropping the first layer's height to 0.05mm: because the first layer is so thin, it becomes kind of translucent and the wider white letter beneath it sort of show through. The net result is that it drops a kind of gaussian blur onto the lettering, which actually improves them - especially at a distance.

Other than that, there's just nothing for it. And half of the suggestions I got concern other slicers, and I couldn't find them or equivalents in PrusaSlicer. Oh well...

I guess that's as good as it's gonna get.

I'm printing those little cable pull tabs on our Prusa XL printer. In the models, I added markings to identify the type of cable, printed directly into the tabs with a different color PLA loaded on head #2.

The problem I have, as you can see, is that the white letters are "overrun" by the back surroundings.

I have to print those parts face down: when the first layer is laid down onto the bed, the black surrounding is printed first with head #1, leaving empty space for the symbols, then head #2 comes in and fill in the spaces after the head change:

The problem apparently is that the black material gets "smooshed out" on the bed and partly fills in the void, and then the white PLA doesn't have enough space to make nice, sharp letters.

It wouldn't be a big problem with larger letters: they would just look like they have fuzzy edges. But those letters are 3.5mm in height and only two 0.4mm-wide lines at the most, so it's basically all fuzziness.

It doesn't happen when I print face up. But then I have to have support for the tabs' walls, and since I print those things by the hundreds, I'm really not keep on having to remove support on hundreds of tiny parts. So it's not an option.

I tried printing slower but it doesn't change much of anything. Not to mention, again, I have to print those things as fast as possible to print as many as possible overnight.

And of course I can't increase the size of the letters: they're as big as the tabs' size will allow.

The letters are readable enough, but they don't really look great. Is there any trick to reduce or eliminate this? I was thinking of trying to print the white first with head #2, then the black with head #1, but I can't find an option in Prusa Slicer to invert the order in which the heads are used.

I'm printing those little cable pull tabs on our Prusa XL printer. In the models, I added markings to identify the type of cable, printed directly into the tabs with a different color PLA loaded on head #2.

The problem I have, as you can see, is that the white letters are "overrun" by the back surroundings.

I have to print those parts face down: when the first layer is laid down onto the bed, the black surrounding is printed first with head #1, leaving empty space for the symbols, then head #2 comes in and fill in the spaces after the head change:

The problem apparently is that the black material gets "smooshed out" on the bed and partly fills in the void, and then the white PLA doesn't have enough space to make nice, sharp letters.

It wouldn't be a big problem with larger letters: they would just look like they have fuzzy edges. But those letters are 3.5mm in height and only two 0.4mm-wide lines at the most, so it's basically all fuzziness.

It doesn't happen when I print face up. But then I have to have support for the tabs' walls, and since I print those things by the hundreds, I'm really not keep on having to remove support on hundreds of tiny parts. So it's not an option.

I tried printing slower but it doesn't change much of anything. Not to mention, again, I have to print those things as fast as possible to print as many as possible overnight.

And of course I can't increase the size of the letters: they're as big as the tabs' size will allow.

The letters are readable enough, but they don't really look great. Is there any trick to reduce or eliminate this? I was thinking of trying to print the white first with head #2, then the black with head #1, but I can't find an option in Prusa Slicer to invert the order in which the heads are used.

Uh oh... Looks like Michael Wolff hit a nerve with the orange utan there.