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Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air


tracyevans

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Posted · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air

I am successfully using Cura v4.8.0 on an Apple MacBook with the new M1 chipset. It functions, but is rather buggy in some places. 

• Previews usually don't work. Nothing shows up in the preview window. (Likely an OpenGL issue?)

• I have to restart to load in a new model, or to do almost anything following performing a slice.

 

That is about all I have noticed so far. Apple brags about the ease of updating applications to run natively with M1. Hope that Ultimaker can address this issue with a quick cure-a.

 

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    Posted (edited) · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air
    17 hours ago, tracyevans said:

    Hope that Ultimaker can address this issue with a quick cure-a.

    That is unfortunately fairly unlikely.

     

    Cura uses a lot of components that are not written or maintained by Ultimaker. A GUI framework called Qt, a language called Python. These are very bug projects, and it will take time before these run natively. But even then there is the problem that upgrading to newer versions of these dependencies mean that Cura will no longer work on older OS X versions.

     

    Native support for M1 is slated for Qt 6.1. Version 6.0 of that framework requires OS X 10.15 or newer. Cura currently uses Qt 5.10, which supports OS X 10.11 and newer. Updating to a version of Qt that is native to M1 (once that is available) means dropping support for all Macs that still run 10.11 - 10.14. OS X 10.14 is only 2.5 year old.

    Edited by ahoeben
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    Posted · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air

    It is not only M1. My MBP is a year old and Cura stopped working this week for me.  Same issues in regards to not having any Preview. Here is my processor.  2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7

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    Posted (edited) · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air

    To clarify: my response above was about creating an M1 native version, in reaction to the remark that Apple boats that updating applications should be easy.

     

    To keep Cura working with newer versions of OSes and drivers is an ongoing battle.

    Edited by ahoeben
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    • 4 weeks later...
    Posted · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air

    God will provide.

     

    This is the type of thing where as a programmer you can't really be sure how long it will take to fix until you fixed it.

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    Posted (edited) · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air
    On 1/2/2021 at 7:19 PM, Husar said:

    It is not only M1. My MBP is a year old and Cura stopped working this week for me.  Same issues in regards to not having any Preview. Here is my processor.  2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7

    think you have an diff issue, i have the last of the non-M1 MBP, same spec as yours and it works fine in the latest 'Big Sur' 11.1 release, it does sometimes loose ability to see the sliced preview but closing and re-opening Cura fixes that.

    Edited by Link
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    Posted · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air
    On 1/2/2021 at 9:07 AM, ahoeben said:

    That is unfortunately fairly unlikely.

     

    Cura uses a lot of components that are not written or maintained by Ultimaker. A GUI framework called Qt, a language called Python. These are very bug projects, and it will take time before these run natively. But even then there is the problem that upgrading to newer versions of these dependencies mean that Cura will no longer work on older OS X versions.
     

    Native support for M1 is slated for Qt 6.1. Version 6.0 of that framework requires OS X 10.15 or newer. Cura currently uses Qt 5.10, which supports OS X 10.11 and newer. Updating to a version of Qt that is native to M1 (once that is available) means dropping support for all Macs that still run 10.11 - 10.14. OS X 10.14 is only 2.5 year old.


    Cura was just as limited with Mac OS versions that could not run OpenGL 4. I am sure that the topic of OpenGL versions has been covered quite a bit. That excludes compatibility in older versions of the OS already. Current versions of Cura on M1 Macs have flaws just as the current versions running under Rosetta 2 have flaws. High Sierra ( OS X 10.13) is years old, and does not have what it needs to fully run Cura versions that rely on OGL4. Letting those older operating systems go in abandon for even a beta of Cura that is meant to natively support an M1 series chip is no different.

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    Posted · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air
    2 hours ago, kpanattoni said:


    Cura was just as limited with Mac OS versions that could not run OpenGL 4. I am sure that the topic of OpenGL versions has been covered quite a bit. That excludes compatibility in older versions of the OS already. Current versions of Cura on M1 Macs have flaws just as the current versions running under Rosetta 2 have flaws. High Sierra ( OS X 10.13) is years old, and does not have what it needs to fully run Cura versions that rely on OGL4. Letting those older operating systems go in abandon for even a beta of Cura that is meant to natively support an M1 series chip is no different.

    Cura doesn't need OGL4 to run, it needs OGL2> to run. Certain features will only work if you have OGL4

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    Posted (edited) · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air

    For the record, I did not mean to imply there will never be an M1-native version of Cura. At some point I am sure it will come. However it will not be a quick fix, even if dropping support for older OSes is accepted.

     

    The newer version(s) of the Qt framework drop support for QtQuick Controls version 1, which still makes up a large portion of the Cura interface and most 3rd party plugins. All of that would have to be rewritten to use QtQuick Controls version 2. And then there's changing Cura from interfacing with OpenGL directly in in favor of a cross platform abstraction layer provided by Qt so Mac OS can use Metal and other OSes can use Vulkan - where available. Both are very major changes for Cura.

    Edited by ahoeben
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    Posted · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air
    15 hours ago, ahoeben said:

    For the record, I did not mean to imply there will never be an M1-native version of Cura. At some point I am sure it will come. However it will not be a quick fix, even if dropping support for older OSes is accepted.

     

    The newer version(s) of the Qt framework drop support for QtQuick Controls version 1, which still makes up a large portion of the Cura interface and most 3rd party plugins. All of that would have to be rewritten to use QtQuick Controls version 2. And then there's changing Cura from interfacing with OpenGL directly in in favor of a cross platform abstraction layer provided by Qt so Mac OS can use Metal and other OSes can use Vulkan - where available. Both are very major changes for Cura.

    We are going to change to Qt 6 in the near future. The change to Vulkan is probably going to take much longer (and I also consider that to be less important)

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    Posted (edited) · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air
    44 minutes ago, nallath said:

    The change to Vulkan is probably going to take much longer

    Vulkan may not be important at this point, but Metal might be. And to get compatibility with Metal, you get Vulkan "for free" (via SPiR-V and qt.rhi).

    Edited by ahoeben
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    Posted · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air

    As long as we don't have to do something specific for Mac (eg; maintain different rendering code to support OSX), i'm fine with it.

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    Posted (edited) · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air

    I recently got an M1 Mac and threads like this had me scared that I might need to keep around an older Mac just to run Cura.  But so far I am having zero bugs / glitches with Cura 4.8 and MacOS 12 / Rosetta 2.

     

    Anyway just adding that here for those coming here from a search engine trying to figure out how well Cura is working on M1s now.  It seems like some patches might have been made to Rosetta 2 since the interface glitch problems people were having above.

     

    Actually now that I re-read the above this is for native M1 build from sources, oops!  I only did the Intel/Rosetta way.

    Edited by scottfsmith
    mis-reading
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    Posted (edited) · Cura is usable but buggy on Apple M1 MacBook Air

    This post helped me.  I am on a 2020 MBP 16", so it's Intel.  But I am having serious preview issues with lines emanating out like a starburst.  So some of the issues attributed to M1, may just be Mac in general; OGL on Mac in general.

     

    I made a separate post about it, here:

     

     

    Edited by AEtherScythe
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