I have an Ender 3 V3 SE, never did a firmware update and haven't had any issues with bed levelling. The auto calibration does its job pretty reliably for me. However, mine had some issues with the gantry being at not quite right angle. It could still print, but it got much better after printing and inserting the appropriate shims under the z-rail mounts.
zockerr
Well damn. I hope they can get a start under a new company. Annapurna has been kind of a seal of approval for high quality, small dev team games that weren't the usual triple A bullshit or obvious cash grabs.
Remember, this is System76, not necessarily pop os. Personally, I'd guess it's gonna be some new hardware.
Every time I read about this kerfuffle, I am astounded by the sheer stupidity of the manufacturer. Even if they may be technically in the right here(I don't know, since the contracts they have with the operator aren't public), they effectively shoot themselves in the foot with this PR Desaster. Especially the various national rail operators across Europe will think twice about buying NEWAG, since these operators usually have their own maintenance and repair centers, and expect to service their rolling stock there. And those national operators still make up the lion's share of the European rail market.
I'm running 1.0.6 apparently. It simply didn't occur to me to update it, since it's not connected to the internet and worked fine out of the box for me.
I'd consider the performance quite good given the low price. Sure there are faster printers out there, but with the default profile in orca slicer it can do a benchy in ~50 minutes which is good enough for me. And quality wise the prints seem to be on par with what other people are producing with much more expensive printers.
What's missing are some comfort features: no runout sensor, no failed print detection and no network connectivity mean that printing is a relatively manual process and it's "risky" to do long prints unsupervised, because this thing will happily produce spaghetti until the gcode is done.