Anyone running a laser cutter on open source software knows the pain of juggling separate tools for raster work, vector jobs and machine control. Rayforge 1.1, the latest release from Barebaric, tackles that by folding more of the workflow into one package, and this version finally runs natively on macOS alongside Windows and Linux, covering both Intel and Apple Silicon machines.
The headline addition for me is the dithered raster engraving operation, which opens the door to proper grayscale results instead of flat one-tone output. The raster side has been tidied up too: the separate raster operations are now merged into a single unified dialog with refreshed settings, and a new histogram lets users set white and black points for depth engraving thresholds. The engraving workflow also allows adjusting scan-line angle and line spacing, which gives fine control over how a job is laid down.
Under the hood, the pipeline rewrite looks like the real workhorse of this release. It delivers better performance on complex projects, cuts memory usage, and fixes memory leaks, plus race conditions and chunk alignment issues in depth engraving were corrected as well. A fixed rasterizer angle distortion is another solid catch. On top of that there is a new G-code console for talking to the machine directly, support for dynamic power mode through a new G-code dialect, angle constraints in the parametric sketcher, and a raised maximum laser spot size of 10mm.
One open thread: the maker has asked users for suggestions on what features should come next, so the roadmap is genuinely up in the air. Installation is covered by Snap, Ubuntu PPA, Flatpak and pip developer setups, and the docs now include an interactive installation guide.
Project by Barebaric. Watch it on their YouTube channel: