I’ve noticed a general sentiment that printing on Linux is (or at least was) extremely cumbersome and difficult. Why is that?
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.
You’re printin experience within Linix is going to entirely depend on which printer you have. Some work out of the box immediately others take hours to get working and digging through forums looking for drivers.
I’d say 70% work out of the box with 10% requiring about 30 min of tinkering to get working. The last 10% is completely impossible
It was terrible in the 90’s. Since CUPS became standard around 2000 it’s significantly easier.
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 pageWhat if they printed 1 ad for 1 page…
^Shutup me stop giving them ideas^
My 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
It depends… 3d printing works fine :D
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.
For basic document printing it’s been great but for doing fancy print jobs it’s tough on any os depending on the printer and support. My wife makes stickers and notebooks and got a fancy Epson printer and going windows Mac and Linux it was a pain. She finally got it down on her windows machine.
Even the documentation was terrible. It told her for duplex prints she would have to manually move the paper but once she figured it out it was all automatic. Youtube guides were even worse since they said it wasn’t even possible on that model
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.
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.
The Canon Pixma has always problematic for me with driver issues.
Interesting, I have no problems with a Pixma TS8350. Printing is working as shitty as it has always been on Windows. I have yet to configure the scanner to be fair.
The Canon driver needs to be installed on Fedora and has never worked out of the box without some tweaking. Canon is not really in the Linux support game.
Ii admit it didn’t work out of the box on Mint as well, but didn’t take more then 10 minutes of tweaking. But yes, I would not call it “Linux-friendly”.
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.
My brother needed the driver installed in debian on Qubes but has been flawless beyond that. When I was still running arch it just worked out of the box
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.
Any problem I’ve ever had printing is almost exclusively a problem with the printer, it’s usually yellow or cyan. Doesn’t matter the document is black&white.
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
