I’ve noticed a general sentiment that printing on Linux is (or at least was) extremely cumbersome and difficult. Why is that?

  • Oisteink@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    Printing is a bitch no matter the platform and its usually the producers of the printers that fail. Everyone wants to make their own standard or interpret any standard in their own way. Duplex settings? Sometimes easy to find, and sometimes called something else and put in a weird spot of the interface.

    Basic printing to usb is fine on Linux. My pi zero hooked to a brother laser has been providing wifi printing for me for the last 5 years. Installed cups and connected the usb and it was rocking

  • mumei@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    I have a HP printer and printing is never a smooth process. No idea why, but it takes me 5/10 minutes each time

    • space_of_eights@lemmy.mlNederlands
      0·
      6 months ago

      I have the exact opposite experience. It always prints and although it only prints about 6 pages per minute, it starts immediately. However, I have an old-ish HP laser printer without the crappy adware.

      My next printer will not be a HP for that reason.

    • Sparky@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      0·
      6 months ago

      From my experience I’ve had to deal with their software adware for which I’ve had to close pop ups and upsell ads before I could do anything with their printers, so that might be why it takes long to print a simple page

      • mumei@lemmy.world
        0·
        6 months ago

        My issue lies elsewhere, it takes me that long to have the printer recognized by the OS, then by CUPS browser, then I send the printing job and… it just stalls, never prints. I then cycle the USB ports and start all over again until it miraculously prints

  • SlippiHUD@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    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.

  • rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • InverseParallax@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      Brother is amazing, only printer I’ve ever used that was automatically detected by every device including freebsd.

  • RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    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.

  • Magister@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    I had a Samsung colour laser printer, they provided driver for linux, I installed them, everything works, full support for settings etc

  • gomp@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    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).

  • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
    0·
    6 months ago

    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.

  • variants@possumpat.ioEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    For basic document printing it’s been great but for doing fancy print jobs it’s tough on any os depending on the printer and support. My wife makes stickers and notebooks and got a fancy Epson printer and going windows Mac and Linux it was a pain. She finally got it down on her windows machine.

    Even the documentation was terrible. It told her for duplex prints she would have to manually move the paper but once she figured it out it was all automatic. Youtube guides were even worse since they said it wasn’t even possible on that model

  • papafoss@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    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.

  • The Doctor@beehaw.orgEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

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

  • Unmapped@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    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.