I’ve noticed a general sentiment that printing on Linux is (or at least was) extremely cumbersome and difficult. Why is that?
It depends… 3d printing works fine :D
apt purge cups-* libcups* libppd*Thank me later.
Yeah, this news cycle may not be the best for CUPS advocacy 😄
It’s definitely not helping haha
Just uninstall cups-browsed, how are you going to print w/o CUPS?
You can’t print anymore. Try to use a plotter.
Because printing in Linux both works and is supported and not supported and hope that there are drivers and they work.
For example, I have a brother printer and in both arch and Ubuntu/mint the printer worked out of the box. But I was missing features like double sided printing. So I had to download drivers for it.
In arch the drivers were on the AUR, so I was printing is seconds.
In Ubuntu/mint they weren’t in my package manager, so I had to go to brother’s website and hope they had drivers. Brother did and while it took a bit it did work too. No worse than windows.
my printer spits out page upon page of random characters and mess when I try to print from my desktop, gave up and use my phone now
You need to set the correct settings. It takes a few tries but in my experience it isn’t that hard
you need to set the correct settings
thanks for the insightful suggestion wowee
It was terrible in the 90’s. Since CUPS became standard around 2000 it’s significantly easier.
As long as your printer is supported, it’s not difficult. The problem is that if you need advanced options, like artists need usually, the options aren’t there.
Drivers.
You don’t need them these days as everything uses standard protocols
Yes, but back then.
I’ve never bien able to get printing to work on arch, void or nixos.
For some reason though debian, fedora, open s’use ans their derivatives have been easier than on windows
An u until live CD will find my decade old HP laser and print to it without any work.
Getting my NIXOS to print at the same printer? About an hour.
Anything on Nix takes a long time
I kind of like that aspect of it… Is that wrong?
No, it is highly reproducible. I think the idea of Nix OS isn’t bad. I actually looked into it for Samba as deploying software on Nix is easy. The problem is that it doesn’t scale well.
I think Nix is the future. I feel like at some point we could have fedora ublue for all distros by using nix with GUI configs.
I can’t see that happening but you never know
I did have a weird issue with my printer under nix, turns out it was a bug. I guess 1h time investment is about right.
But that also meant that my Laptop and my GF’s PC were a 0 seconds time investment.
I think that’s neat :D
This has been my experience also. My Brother printer/scanner works great with linux.
HP Laser 107w, driverless, over LAN.
I just Ctrl+P from any software and it prints.
It also prints programmatically (for e.g. folk.computer ) thanks to IPP.
I didn’t have to “think about printing” since I have that setup so I don’t know where you get that sentiment.
Linux printing is very complex. Before Foomatic came along you got to experience it in all it’s glory and setting up a working printing chain was a pain. The Foomatic Wikipedia page has a diagram that will make your head spin.
No doubt, the kernel itself is also quite complex… but my comment here is on the user experience perspective, namely, for me at least “it just works”. So I’m not trying to imply it will work for anybody flawlessly nor that it’s due to the simplicity of the stack, solely that it works, for me.
I use printer with a USB personally. No issues with that but I got an HP printer that is really weird with the network stuff
It’s fine now, but getting CUPS installed, configured, and getting proper drivers for your printer used to be incredibly difficult, especially if you were new to Linux and didn’t know how to do any of that stuff.
Anecdotally Windows is the only platform I’ve used where printing (and scanning) didn’t tend to “just work”. The only issue I’ve had printing under Linux was with a second hand printer my dad got that we couldn’t get to print from any computer. (shrug)
I have a HP printer and printing is never a smooth process. No idea why, but it takes me 5/10 minutes each time
I have the exact opposite experience. It always prints and although it only prints about 6 pages per minute, it starts immediately. However, I have an old-ish HP laser printer without the crappy adware.
My next printer will not be a HP for that reason.
Teach me your ways. I don’t have a very new model, I think it’s a 4130e or something. Do you use CUPS?
cups + hplip . The hplip package is probably key.
From my experience I’ve had to deal with their
softwareadware for which I’ve had to close pop ups and upsell ads before I could do anything with their printers, so that might be why it takes long to print a simple pageMy issue lies elsewhere, it takes me that long to have the printer recognized by the OS, then by CUPS browser, then I send the printing job and… it just stalls, never prints. I then cycle the USB ports and start all over again until it miraculously prints
What if they printed 1 ad for 1 page…
^Shutup me stop giving them ideas^
