boomtownxcs

Hello Everyone! I am fairly new to the 3d printing scene at home and what I consider to be "user grade" 3d printers such as the Printrbot and other low cost printers. I purchased a Printrbot roughly one year ago and started attempting to print utilizing Cura, with a few decent prints (two to be exact) coming out of the machine. I finally decided that my print issue was with a warped print bed and proceeded to store the machine in a cupboard and give up. Turn the time dial forward to this week and I have upgraded the print bed on the Bot and gave it another go. My primary printing system is a laptop running windows 7 and originally Cura 15.04. I began attempting to print calibration cubes and returned to the same issues seen before, all layers look OKAY at best and the top of the print is transparent/bubbled. I decided to upgrade Cura version to 2.3/2.4 and began running into issues printing via USB which prompted me to borrow my work Mac computer, install Cura and try a print. Lo and behold.. I have the best quality print of the bots life. This then prompted me to investigate potential causes between the machines (bad com ports, bad USB driver on the windows laptop, etc...). Testing numerous laptops with Linux Mint, Debian Jessie, a second windows 7 machine and a windows 10 machine all showed something that strikes me as odd.. The Windows machines cannot print with the same quality and settings nor are they as easy to connect the printer. This has brought me to the point of questioning the true meaning of life, why the sky is blue and why windows simply sucks at 3d printing. Mind you the original 15.06 Cura connected to the bot fine and allowed me to tune my Z height for the auto level probe. I'm curious if anyone else may have ran into this type of issue before, I am unable to find anything using the trust Google for similar noted issues, is there a disclaimer out in the wild that I missed saying "Hey, you should really use a *nix variant to 3d print with."? Now I sit after 10 hours of successful prints more confused and angry that I had wasted so much time trying to get the printer working to match what I had seen others report, perplexed as to how this was my issue the whole time spanning across numerous slicing software versions. I am genuinely curious how an OS could make such a difference, even when swapping to older *nix versions of cura, the print quality remains incredible.