silhouette has a much better open source reputation if you want this type of machine. Everybody in the crafting world seems to have the circut though, and you can buy their machines (parts, supplies) all over, while I've never seen silhouette in a local store.

I have a silhouette cameo 4 I'm pretty happy with. Silhouette studio works, it doesn't handle svgs very well so when importing I tend to render svgs as a black bitmap and then trace that in silhouette studio. Being able to print registration marks and have the cutter align itself against those is invaluable. I've done clones of paper craft kits, perfectly cut out iron on transfers forct shirts, 3d trading card art, and trading card proxies on mine

yep, today's reminder silhouette is (quietly) a division of the larger Graphtec, and you can move up from the baby machines thru to a Graphtec cutter!

drive 'em with inkscape, drive 'em with the silhouette studio, hell, there's a bridge graphtec model that can also take silhouette studio jobs...