I’ve noticed a general sentiment that printing on Linux is (or at least was) extremely cumbersome and difficult. Why is that?
Are you old enough to remember Winmodems and NDISWrapper? There used to be some hardware that was so cheap that the Windows driver needed to do some of the basic work. They were never compatible with anything but Windows (and maybe 98 or XP at that). I’m sure there were some printers like that.
Combined with poor driver support early on, and a lack of standards (at least on the consumer end), and the need to have a separate PPD file for every make and model of printer, and printing used to be a mess. (It almost got bad again when Microsoft tried pushing their XPS format as a replacement for PostScript, PCL, PDF, and EPS, but that didn’t catch on.)
Apple buying CUPS (and hiring its lead developer) was great for the community. They got it working all but perfectly. I’ve never had a problem printing on Linux; HP, Brother, or otherwise.
FYI: the developer quit Apple and forked his project into OpenCUPS, but I haven’t tried that.
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
my experience is that through network, it’s just flawless. I turned on my printer and sure there it was. (though this feature just became a huge issue recently :P)
If you have a hp printer they got a official software for it
I haven’t used a new printer or an inkjet in a number of years now, but using my 18yo HP laserjet is a matter of plugging it in and checking it’s status under the main distro settings menu. That was also on par with the windows process iirc.
I do remember 20 years ago when I had to sideloard pcmcia wifi drivers, though.
True, i have 20yo hp inkjet and 17yo epson inkjet, old printers work like a charm on linux and you can refill them with standard medical syringe too
It is way easier than anything else.
This was also my recent experience on PopOs!
I just started with PopOS a couple years ago. I’m not a power user. I’ve got one of those crappy travel printers. I think it’s Canon? I forget. It worked just fine for me.
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
I think that used to be the case more than it is now. Linux now uses the same printing system (CUPS) as macOS, and macOS printing has to work or Apple’s customers would be unsatisfied.
It used to be much, much more difficult than it is today, but your experiences will still vary according to what type of printer you have. The problem is drivers. There are still printers out there that have no working Linux driver (mostly old, non-Postscript-supporting, with no Mac drivers either). Some will work with a generic driver, but some features aren’t available. The more annoying case is the one where the manufacturer put out a driver once, many years ago, it doesn’t work properly with modern versions of CUPS, and they can’t be arsed to revise it.
But most printers these days will do basic one-sided 100%-size prints out of the box, and that’s all many people need.
That’s not been my experience.
Granted, printers suuuuuck. But I was legit surprised when both the printing and scanning functions in Linux were hands down better than windows.
SAME. Everything prints faster and worked well from day one.
SANE? :D
We raise our CUPS to your pun.
Well played!
lol
Haha, nice.
Same! I’m not at my computer at the moment so I can’t check the name of the scanning app i use but yeah, works perfectly. I use a Brother printer as well which I also can’t remember the model name of.
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 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
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
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.
Is printing cumbersome and difficult on Linux? Yes, it can be. Is it better than Windows? Also yes.
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.
Printing on Linux has been seamless for me so far, unlike windows and macos
