As someone in Southern Ontario I want you guys to know that if there’s anything we can do to help you get rid of the vicious cheeto-in-chief we’ve got your back. Feel free to “blame Canada!” if it helps that cause, but we’re going to stand up to him, and you guys should too. We’ll help any way we can. This is unacceptable.

Most aggregation services are also aggravation services, so this really makes sense either way.

That means Bedrock unless you use the Geyser tool someone else mentioned to allow Bedrock to connect to Java but I have no experience with that and am not sure how reliably it would actually work as they are quite different versions of the game. I have no idea how it would handle mods that are not supported by the Bedrock clients for example.

First you need to understand the difference between Bedrock edition and Java edition. Bedrock is for consoles, phones and Windows, it’s the default version that Microsoft pushes now. It’s not compatible with Java clients or Java servers. So if you’re planning to have the kid play on Switch or something like that, it’s not going to work.

Assuming you’re clear on all that, you have a few options for Java servers, you can run a plain jane vanilla server (the one that Microsoft provides) fairly easily but it has some limitations, and it’s not the most manageable solution. Modded servers are much more capable and flexible but also can be a little more complex in some cases. Overall, I’ve found Purpur the easiest and most sustainable choice at least a few years ago when I was looking for the right choice it seemed like most people agreed this was the best option. Fabric is another great option, especially if you want to use mods! Fabric has a huge modding ecosystem, second only to Forge.

However I also need to mention that I’ve got a heavily modded Forge-based server running right now and I really didn’t find that any more difficult to set up than any of the others. Even though people usually complain about forge being “difficult” somehow. So take that for what it’s worth. I think it doesn’t really matter THAT much which server software you use unless you have specific requirements around things like mods, spawn protection, and other kinds of configuration that are probably most useful for large, public servers.

If you do want to run a bedrock server, it gets a little more complicated as you might have to break some things out of the walled garden. I haven’t had a lot of success with that but I understand it is possible.

I don’t agree with your premise that the performance and functionality is so far below every competitor. That is not my experience. What are you basing your claim on?

They are well made machines with high quality components and are in most cases perfectly capable of going as fast as the plastic allows. And if they don’t, a few minor upgrades to the hardware will get them flying as they’re typically mostly going to be hotend-limited. Are you competing the actual realistic maximum acceptable performance of comparable machines that have been independently tested by an experienced reviewer, or are you comparing numbers someone copied from marketing? Because these are not the same thing and only one of them actually reflects reality.

As far as functionality, the only feature I see wanting in Prusa’s lineup is IDEX, which I prefer over toolswitchers for making large numbers of small parts. I keep hoping their next model will be a spiffy little IDEX model, but no luck so far.

Prusa is tuned for reliability and consistency. They occupy a weird and illogical niche, for people who don’t want to have to tinker with their machines AT ALL but want to have the ability to. I personally fit in this niche, and I love my Prusa, but they really don’t make a ton of sense for most people I think, and there are probably better choices if you don’t fall into this niche.