@cyberwolfie @cyberwolfie you might wanna checkout ratrig too, they're a Portuguese company (tho I don't know where they manufacture the printers, Prusa has factory in Prague) and are kind of open too.

As for Slicer, you can use Prusaslicer for Bambulab or Creality, Bambulab has their own slicer opensourced (actually fork from Prusaslicer) and AFAIK works on linux.

You'll always be able to use freecad, blender whatever modelling tool. You model it and export STL, which can be then fed into any slicer.

As for HW, it's hard to say. Průša core one isn't much more pricey than Bambu, what it can do we shall yet to see.

Bambulab started as closed source, but it seems they've been opening at least some of it (they now allow custom firmware, allegedly offline firmware updates, so you can run them fully offline), whereas Průša has moved from the 100% opensource to someting more restrictive, still being much more open than Bambulab.

N. B. I'm a Prusa owner and have never owned a Bambulab.