I have a Postscript 3 compatible ipp network color laser printer for about 15 years now and it works without any issues with Linux, way better then it does from Windows. So I never understood way they say that printing is cumbersome with Linux.
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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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
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.
I'm hooked on my brother with a wifi print server now. All three major OS in our house, I just make sure the printer stays updated. Not sure how to print photos, though.
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My migration to Linux Mint coincided with getting a Brother Laser printer (DCP-L3520CDW) and I've had zero issues with text, photos or scanning. I just fired up the Brother and Mint said "oh, you've got a printer, wanna use it?"
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
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
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 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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
My Xerox works way better than on osx.
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.
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