printing is bad regardless of OS. Learn to draw and type very well and you will never need a printer, also curse everyone that forces you to use printers they should be shunned from society. We will have full digitalisation by bullying if necessary
I’m convinced they’ll never figure out a practical solution to take technical drawings out to construction sites digitally (battery life, limited screen size, dirt, hazardous atmospheres, the unwillingness of my boss to pay for expensive specialized hardware …). Other than that I’m with you.
just don’t use technical drawings buildings were meant to be built not drawn, simple as.
Printers are something they’ve actually figured out on the last few years.
I can go somewhere I’ve never been, get the login for the network, and print documents from my phone without any downloading drivers, sacrificing goats or anything.
you don’t know how many drains that sysadmin installed under her altar, do you?
I hooked up a 2013 printer to my new wifi network, opened a pdf on my phone, clicked “print” and selected the printer from the dropdown list. No driver installation. No special app for the printer. It just works.
ooh, did they sacrifice the goats in the factory? pretty snazzy; i haven’t bought any new hardware in years, and this might just be the impetus I need to run out to microcenter.
Deferred sacrifice. They still need to be sacrificed. He just doesn’t know when.
Printers are bad under Windows because Windows supports nothing out of the box
That’s simply not true anymore. Most printers work on windows locally and through a network without any special driver installations these days.
You can buy a printer, a computer, and a wifi adapter, network them together, and start printing without installing any printer utilities or additional drivers.
They’ve come a long way in this area.
But they aren’t as good as Linux (CUPS)
sudo pacman -Syu --needed cups system-config-printer avahi nss-mdns foomatic-{db,db-{engine, nonfree}}sudo systemctl enable --now cups.socket avahi-daemon.serviceRebooting after helps if it doesn’t find the printer right away.
Laughs in Archlinux and Brother printer
Cries in the same
Idk how is it with brother printers, but brother scanners are an absolute PITA to make work on Arch
I can’t even get this Brother to scan to a flash drive in its own USB port. It acts like it’s successful; it scans and no errors show up… but the files just aren’t there. Tried multiple USB drives and made sure they were formatted to FAT32 in a sector size that Brother recommended in the manual.
Printing to it from Debian was even easier than expected, though. Plug it in, it shows up as a networked printer, and you print to it.
Over the network can be hit or miss but the usb cable and the drivers from the AUR have yet to fail me
I have a ds640 (an usb scanner), and I’ve spent maybe 2 hours installing&reinstalling&removing drivers from the aur. Nothing worked. Installed Fedora just to see if things worked over there (as fedora is officially supported by brother) and things worked perfectly. Then i booted on my arch install arch once again, AND EVERYTHING WORKED. Alleluia. But I still don’t know why, as I didn’t touch nothing between last time i tried and now. Idk.
Maybe just the reboot? Something was probably installed that was not started yet and it was started as part of the boot process?
Maintaining a printer is hell on any OS. I learned to not own a printer long ago. That’s what places that offer printing services are for. And it’s not very expensive typically
There’s actually a surprising amount of linux printer drivers that don’t come included with CUPS but are available for download from OEM sites. Canon ships an all in one tar.gz that includes PPD files, DEB and RPM install formats, and a lazy script to install it for you along with any dependencies.
I have tried to install Canon LBP2900B drivers a thousand times. It does not work on any distribution. I have to use a windows VM.
I just recently went through some linux printer woes. When my toner cartridge got down below 25% documents spooled from my Linux machine would fail with an out of toner error. Files from windows and the diagnostic pages from the printer itself printed just fine. Turned out I had been using a slightly incorrect print driver on my Linux machine this entire time. After a TON of digging I managed to find the correct driver and was able to print again. Only wasted most of a morning figuring it out. Lol!
Odd how this is the opposite of my experience. My mother is unable to print or scan things 2/3 of the time on her HP printer using windows 10. You know, the OS whose parent company has very close relations with HP, and is updated in a manner that forces their users to use the most up-to-date official HP drivers, even going as far as to prevent them from using any other drivers, including the default windows ones.
Meanwhile, my Linux laptop can operate the printer just fine. Never had an issue. I can even operate the loading tray, despite the HP tech support reps telling my mother it is broken.
My HP printer has a special mode where it pretends to be a CD-ROM drive with the driver files on it. One time it entered this mode and I had to use a Windows machine to kick it back into normal printer mode. Couldn’t find any Linux way to do this.
The rest of printing from Linux has been smoother than Windows though. I have a Linux machine run CUPS and that makes printing from Windows easy.
Half my family just email whatever they want printing to my Dad and he prints it at his workplace.
We’ve owned multiple printers over the years but 8/10 no matter what device you used, The printer just didn’t work. The “Dad strategy” has never failed.
First day at work for junior software engineer, he is super excited and stays late getting familiar with the project.
Finally he gets up to leave and in the hallway he runs into the CEO himself, looking lost, standing with a piece of paper in his hand in front of a shredder.
“Oh, thank God,” says the CEO, “I thought everybody has left. Look, my secretary has gone and I only have two minutes until I have to be back in the conference call. Do you know how to work this thing?”
The junior looks at the shredder, notices it’s not plugged in, connects it, the thing turns on and he shows the CEO how to put in the paper and press the button. They watch the paper as it starts going in with a sigh of relief.
“Thank you so much,” says the CEO, “you’re a life-saver. I only need one copy.”
I’m on your dad’s role but for my family. It is pretty annoying specially when they can’t explain properly what they want so you have to do guesswork. Anyway it nice when people trust you so long the do not take you for granted.
Rarely used inkjet? If so, your ink dries before you can use it, I’ve had it happen after like 3 pages and then letting it sit, dry next time I try. Laser printers don’t do this, the toner will sit for a long time, and it seems to last longer in general.
If it isn’t that, but the brand is HP, the problem is that your printer should never have been born and should be thrown back into the fires from whence it came. Terrible, terrible printers.
The one kept at home until recently was some early 2000s white(yellowing) and blue thing, might have been Laser.
We had an Inkjet sometime around 2014 and went back to using the old one because it worked more of the time.
💀shart Linux.
Def a skill issue. But seeing as they are using arch I have no doubts that they will get over this and ultimately come out learning more about Linux and computers overall (which is probably their goal seeing as they are using arch)
I’ve never had issues printing on arch (btw)
The ONE printer that I have, and arch doesn’t have a driver for it, WHY?!?
because printers are the most proprietary fedjacked snitchware that has ever existed.
open source DIY paper printers need to be a thing.
@primrosepathspeedrun I tried to convince Pine64 people to do printer next, they politely turned my down since this is almost impossible due all licensing
ps: but probably DIY crowd could ignore this
@lemmy.world @hacktheegg
Artificial, licensing? What kind of licensing could one possibly need to build a machine that deposits ink onto paper? Printers have existed for way more than 20 years so surely all the important patents must have expired.
@grishka @ABasilPlant @AncientGood I made a very little (re)search and found what all main components: #postscript , Printer Command Language ( #PCL ) and a bunch of ISO standards not a subject of licensing. I dunno, maybe this anti #privacy shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots — should be licensed 🤷♂️
Definitely, Unfortunately tho, the only thing currently standardised about printers is the paper
🤨for what exactly is a printer needed in 2024?
I’ve heard cybersec guys say they print off things like recovery codes and keep the physical copy stored. Also, entire governments still run on pen and paper (shitty inefficient governments).
Fair, but a string I can still write by hand😂
" And every citizen that’s living in this city Is a digit on the charts we’re climbing Political systems are too inefficient They split like the atom and burned in the fission Now every department and every decision Defer to the herds of our corporate divisions " shitty inefficient governments are probably better than otherwise
I like this quote. Where is it from?
The Stupendium - The Data Stream
Fax.
When I can’t wrap my head around a technical document or journal article, I print it. My brain craves paper. I’m a software engineer, so believe me that I would be live inside the computer if I could.
😮 I definitely read better on my smartphone than on big paper, I always get lost if the medium is too large…
Maybe that’s just my age🤔
Hard copies. You should always keep hardcopies of your most important documents, financial records and certifications. Especially when users can be locked out of a cloud storage these days because an AI decided to flag their account.
😁i have my own cloud
Same. But I still keep critical paper work in a fireproof safe, just in case.
Cloud of wood fibres?
Jesus invented thumbdrives and HDDs SSDs etc for this very reason, the cloud is just my offsite back up of that… having been kicked off “the cloud” by MS some years ago, fcuk those guys.
Agencies that are still living in the 90s…
Stickers
My personal printer works flawlessly on Linux, except that it cannot be convinced to print double-sided, no matter how deep I dig into the settings. Boils my blood.
printers are annoying
Oh God, this brought back a traumatic memory. I was hanging out after hours at our office to look after a meetup group that was using our space that night. Nothing tricky, make sure people can get in, keep the lights on, make sure nobody sets the place on fire.
I was plugging away on my personal laptop which had Linux on it. Having a great time doing something or other when one of the meetup organisers approached me with a USB stick and asked if I could help them print out some signs to help people know where to go.
My install was rock solid, fast and set up exactly the way I wanted, but in that moment none of that mattered because it was me who froze. I thought back to all the decisions that lead me to that situation, even the conversation with a coworker a few months ago about Linux who literally said “I love Linux but one day I’m just afraid I’ll have to print something or whatever and I won’t be able to”. How foolish I was to dismiss the wisdom in his words that day, and now my worst nightmare had come to pass.
I swallowed hard, looked the organiser in the eyes, and told them I couldn’t help them. I didn’t even try. Best to rip the band-aid off, disappoint them now and get it over with. After the glaring admission left my mouth I waited for the inevitable response. I was a fraud, nothing more than a self proclaimed computer geek who couldn’t accomplish a rudimentary task despite all my time studying and tinkering. It was over, I guess it wasn’t imposter syndrome after all, I really was an imposter and now I’d been discovered.
But instead the the organiser just smiled and said “that’s totally ok, we were just a bit disorganised and didn’t print it before coming this time. Thanks for your help anyway!” And everything was fine. This time.
If it makes you feel any better I’m 99% sure I’d have done the same thing.
Did you bite the bullet and go and print something the next day?
Now that brother, is storytelling.
Hand written signs ftw
I would have tried anyway. Sometimes Linux works better with printing than Windows, some times the other way round. It just depends what the printer is and how you have your system setup.
Just say how it is. “I can try but printers are notorious for making simple things difficult.”
Yeah exactly. Chances are it would have worked provided they installed CUPS - which isn’t hard or slow on arch after all it’s not Gentoo. But if it didn’t at least you have defused expectations while showing you are still willing to try. Something like: I don’t have it setup on this laptop but I will try and get it working quickly, but no promises.
