this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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I've noticed a general sentiment that printing on Linux is (or at least was) extremely cumbersome and difficult. Why is that?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

apt purge cups-* libcups* libppd*

Thank me later.

[–] the16bitgamer 2 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Funny thing is, I don't own a printer, so when I need documents printed I go to the local library. Their computers run Linux, and of all the times I've gone to get a print done it's been an extremely flawless experience. No fuss, no hassle, just load up the document and print it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

when you buy a printer, just look that it says it's for linux, just like you would for windows or osx. people just sometimes run into problems when they retrofit printers for other OSes to work with linux. there's a good chance a windows printer can work with linux, but it's not guaranteed, so do it only, if you got one for free or it originally had been bought for another PC.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

My Xerox works way better than on osx.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Recently ran into an issue with Endeavour OS where the built in printer program would give errors when trying to add my network ecotank printer.

Tried using cups terminal and it worked the first time, and is still working weeks later.

So some of the GUI printer apps that distros ship with have issues apparently, but I don't know the extent of it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I've also had struggles with arch with printing, more so than debian-based distros. EndeavourOS is where i did the most troubleshooting, but its also a problem on my manjaro install (whicj ill move to endeavour... Someday) But learning how to use cups directly was worth it.

Currently, printing via GUI is like 5ppm and very low dpi so... Not great. But at least I can print for the casual use cases out of the box and could work out a terminal solution if I needed to in the meantime.

I don't print much so haven't put time into getting things working better for bigger jobs, but printing is definitely going to be a more hit/miss experience with arch. Its looking like better GUI experience for my specific model will require a driver from the AUR or scripting the Debian install from brothers drivers site. But my model is apparently not as widely used and just hasn't gotten as much community support I guess

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It depends on the brand I guess. Some Canon Pixma did immediately worked with my distro, like literally zero setup required. However, it refuses duplexing. It just won't do it. Not driverless and not with gutenprint, although it lists the specific model, not when setting it as the default, not when setting it per job.

Yet it works on Android no problem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Anything on Nix takes a long time

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I kind of like that aspect of it... Is that wrong?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

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.

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