Comment by efitz
12 hours ago
This is awesome, thank you for doing this work; it’s not glamorous but it’s a key feature to making computers productive.
I know it’s not a popular opinion here but I think that Windows has two killer features that are always overlooked- the standard print dialog (and all the underlying plumbing), and the standard file dialog (at least until Windows 8).
The ability to print and to interact with files, that just works, without having to retrain people every time a new OS comes out, and without having to reprogram your apps or write your own drivers and/or UI, is incredibly important.
Yes, I know Linux and Mac have the same, but IMO Windows was light years ahead for decades, and is still more consistent and easy to use.
Was going to say the same thing, I'm not a big fan of Windows but the printing Just Works. Having read the OPs explanation of why CUPS is the way it is, yeah, now it makes sense.
Maybe CUPS needs a Heartbleed-scale problem to motivate more support.
Mac has always had print to PDF from the start, I'm not sure if even the latest windows comes with that OOB. I'm sure Linux is the same (as in the same as Mac).
Windows has had print to pdf out of the box since windows 10 (approx mid 2015)[1]
[1]: https://pdfa.org/microsoft-adds-print-to-pdf-native-to-windo...
Fair enough, for me that is very late to the game.