Linux

thats just cuz printers generally suck

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)

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

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.

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 sideload pcmcia wifi drivers, though.

It is way easier than anything else.

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.

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

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.

Is printing cumbersome and difficult on Linux? Yes, it can be. Is it better than Windows? Also yes.

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.

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.

Printing on Linux has been seamless for me so far, unlike windows and macos

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.

It used to back in the day, especially if you tried using shitty windows usb inkjets.

Nowadays basically all printers are network printers (they are, aren't they?) plus we have cups which is the same thing macos uses (so manufacturers actually care).

Anecdotally Windows is the only platform I've used where printing (and scanning) didn't tend to "just work". The only issue I've had printing under Linux was with a second hand printer my dad got that we couldn't get to print from any computer. (shrug)

I noticed this too. In theprimeagens recent video on cups problem they kept making jokes about printing on Unix. I think I must be lucky or something cause so far every printer I have setup on Linux has been easier then having to download all the bloatware to make them work on windows. But I have only done about 6 printers so far on Linux.

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.

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.

I’m not sure on this one, but it may depend on the printer. Printing on Linux for me has been the easiest process ever. Windows fights me at every corner, but Linux sees my network printers and they just work out of the box. (I’ve only used Brother printers for the last 20 years)

IDK, my housemates printer required literally 0 setup to work with my linux VM and I've never had an issue. When I print from windows it's a pain in the butt sometimes.

Printing has basically everywhere been annoying. You need(-ed) specific drivers or even apps to make it work and if you have that set up it still can be annoying. And because most of these drivers/apps don’t support Linux printing relied on reverse engineered drivers. Then CUPS came around which made things better. And when apple adopted CUPS for Mac suddenly everyone wanted to support.

If you are really interested check out this episode of destination Linux where it’s discussed in detail.

It was terrible in the 90's. Since CUPS became standard around 2000 it's significantly easier.

I only print docs and pictures. But in my opinion printing on Linux is largely better than Windows. It just works most of the time. And if there is an issue the solution is generally restarting the job.

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.

Dunno, I own the cheapest Ink Jet HP sells and setup is much faster on Linux than via their drivers on Windows.
Gnome Scanner also wipes the floor with any scanning application from HP/MSFT