Comment by ultramancool
10 years ago
Perhaps you're thinking back to the days of manually configuring CUPS?
Any recent printer I've used has just been plug it in and hit print. A better experience than Windows in terms of included drivers and bonjour support too.
No, you've simply been lucky.
I can say my experience matches the above posters as well. Printing in Ubuntu works better than OSX and Windows for the 4 different printers I use regularly.
My experience with both OSX and Windows is that you just need to plug a printer in and it just works. Can't remember that ever happening with BSD/Linux in my experience. :( But it sounds like things have improved which is good to know.
2 replies →
I agree completely. I set up a relative with Linux Mint KDE 17.3 a couple weeks ago and even I was surprised at how easy it was to set up the two printers he wanted to use: one was an old 2003-vintage LaserJet 1012 personal-sized laser printer with USB, the other a newer (I'm guessing 4yo) HP color inkjet of some kind that was WiFi-connected. For the first, I just plugged in the USB cable and a print queue was immediately and automatically set up; I didn't have to do anything. For the latter, I just went into the printer configuration utility, let it search the network, it found the printer and told me its model name/number, then I selected the appropriate driver and printed a test page. No driver downloads, no problems.
By contrast, I had a contract job a year or so ago at a large company where I was given a Win7 laptop and tried to connect to a big Ricoh laser printer. I spent hours messing around with driver downloads trying to get that to work. I finally had to call IT and they sent someone over, and he couldn't get it to work either; he finally found some crazy work-around which I've totally forgotten the details of now.
The only real problem I see with printing on Linux now is that, sometimes, there's multiple CUPS drivers for the same printer (foomatic, hpijs, Postscript, etc.), so it won't automatically pick one and it's not clear which is the best so you might have to just try one and see if it works. Most likely, they all work, but some might have additional features. HP printers are probably the best, though, since they seem to explicitly support Linux (such as with their hpijs drivers). If all printer makers had this level of support, and they cleaned up the redundant/competing drivers, there wouldn't be complaints.
CUPS is better, no doubt. And from a sysadmin perspective CUPS is great, but there are still crazy gotchas.
Part of this is the byzantine config of network discovery, CUPS, driver sources, etc. A big part of the problem is the pieces may be there but distros have done a mediocre job getting everything together on this in the best way for the user.