I have never owned a printer. When my daughter got old enough to ask why don't we have a printer I said: Whenever you want to print, go to the library and I'll give you the money for printing, there is no limit. For some reason the whole family's printing budget has never exceeded 5 Euros per year in the last 20 years. Distance to the library cannot be the reason, it is 1 minute from school. I worked in a paperless company for many years, where the printer was locked to print only contracts and similar documents.
While printing is overrated, of course the library printer needs a driver, too. And preferably open source in true Stallman spirit (I'm not a big Stallman fan, but wasn't it so that the whole Free Software movement started because of a closed source printer driver?). But as a domain of little general importance, I am not surprised about the lack of a thriving community.
I still find reading a long paper (the academic kind) in printed format is much more superior to any electronic screen in any form factor including e-ink displays.
Using pen on paper is much more natural, tactile and much more efficient in terms of concentration and uninterrupted work for me.
Remarkable is nice, e-ink is also nice. I live glued to my Kobo e-book reader and love reading novels and non-fiction from 300 dpi e-ink screen.
However, e-ink lacks speed and color. The papers I read use a lot of color in diagrams and waiting for e-ink screen to refresh, reduce its color palette to accelerate and re-refresh to return its previous mode is both distracting and flow breaking for me.
Also, I use a lot of colors for different things on paper. Different highlighters for different stuff (yellow for "further research", blue to "remember this part"), etc.
iPad with Good reader is almost as good as my workflow but this thing is heavy, backlit screens are eye-straining...
Since PDFs are not made for screens it's also distracting to zoom and scroll too.
So we need another format (maybe ePub) for academic papers to read them effectively on digital devices.
There are a number of occasions where I need to print copies of things that I wouldn't feel comfortable doing on a public printer (bank records, tax returns, 2-factor backup codes, paper copies of private keys for crypto wallets, gpg).
I found an interesting service provided by HP called "Instant Ink" [0]. You pay a subscription and get a fixed number of pages per month. Once the printer is low on ink, they'll automatically send you a new cartridge.
What makes it interesting is that there is a 100% free tier that offers 15 pages per month: perfect for infrequent use.
I've been using Instant Ink for a couple years now and quite like it. No more late night runs to the store hoping they have the one random cartridge I need. And I have only once run through ink so fast that I found myself without a waiting cartridge that had been previously shipped.
We do a lot of printing in the home right now with virtual schooling for my youngers. Watching them try to complete math assignments (this is early elementary, mind you) on a tablet interface is a frustrating experience, and in my opinion hinders their ability to actually learn the relevant skills. Printing the assignments out on paper and having them use a pencil is both faster and gets them into a learning mode better.
I don't remember when I needed to print anything for a bank or the tax office. Certainly not the last 10 years. That probably highly depends on the country. And I did not have any big transactions like buying a house during the last 10 years.
I don't even own crypto currency. Amongst other reasons I don't want to worry in my private life what can go wrong with shitty IT...
The question really is, should you trust presumably a lot of closed source software while printing on internet-connected systems at home? Or even unmaintained open source software. Or open source software that you have not studied. Yeah, I can see some risks, but overall my local library is not known for their cybercriminality skills. So as long as I make sure that I delete my sensitive files ASAP after printing I would not be overly worried.
If I print at work, I at least definitely know that there are several people on the same local network / with admin rights that would have skills to do evil. So even that could be considered risky. But still I do print stuff there (rarely, but it happens) that I would not be comfortable to share.
To elaborate on that, my local library has a pretty dumb laser printer. I don't think it has the memory to store many pages and no significant internet-facing functionality (apart from accepting files if they configued it badly). So I don't think there are significant risks sending my documents thorugh it.
But the city main library has some smart "document center" machine. Amongst other it can "print to pdf" for the paperless age. In other words scan. And send the results to an email address you enter on the touchscreen. Here I would be pretty worried what insecure operating system and software that machine is running. I wouldn't be suprised to read a headline on hackernews that the last 1000 pages printed/scanned on such type of machine are all publicly accessible on the internet...
The main use for my printer is maps for trail running. A custom map produced using OSMaps, some copy+paste magic, with some added notes (navigation hints, checkpoint cut-offs & other pacing notes, emergency numbers), printed on a couple of A4 or A5 sheets of "indestructible" paper, is much more convenient than carrying the full map of the area, or two maps if your route falls over a boundary.
Yes, most of us use GPS watches and have detailed maps on our phones too, but tech can & will fail and when it does while you are a little off course you'll be glad you have the paper map (and, of course, the ability to read it).
There is no need for everyone to have one though: I'm happy to print copies of my maps for others, I know a few people who don't have a printer of their own (they tend to use one at work if needed, or like your suggestion a local library).
I also like printing some things to read and scribble notes on away from the screen. e-ink implementations of this sort of thing are either expensive, so I've not tried them, or smaller than I'd like, or don't work well (big, inexpensive, works well, pick at most two).
I think the quotes are meant to suggest that while paper is not really indestructible, it's failure mode in poor weather is much more graceful than an electronic device. Put the paper in a plastic bag and I know from experience that it will out last your touchscreen device in a down pour in the middle of the woods :)
Plus you've eliminated battery anxiety when the last thing you need is more things to be anxious about.
I currently use Xerox "NeverTear" (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00JWLSZY6/) though there are several other brands readily available that I assume are pretty much the same thing.
I might try Rite in the Rain next time I need to restock (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rite-Rain-Unisex-Waterproof-Copier/...) as it looks about 50% the price-per-sheet and is thinner (75gsm vs 95gsm) which may be better for the maps-folded -into-pocket use case. I am amused/confused that one of the keywords in the URL is "unisex".
Though at only a few sheets per run and most organised runs being cancelled right now, I won't be needing to restock for a while...
The big use of a printer in my household is sheet music. Though some musicians have started using big tablets (with a pedal for turning pages), I expect widespread adoption to be slow and painful.
Musicians are not always particularly tech savvy, and even when they are, they may have little patience for futzing with technology. They expect things to just work, and to not detract from playing and working on the music.
Very well organized musicians and larger ensembles with a dedicated librarian have switched to the tablets, but when you're a bandleader trying to herd 19 cats who were all hired at the last minute, you don't want to add an hour to the time for performing or rehearsing to get them all up and running with disparate platforms, file formats, power cables, and so forth. You hand out folders full of "charts" and off you go.
I worked somewhere where documents were printed, then signed by one of these https://axidraw.com/ using the client's signature (with their permission) to be posted to a pension provider who required wet signatures.
jSignature looks interesting. I wrote something like that for capturing signatures on Android years ago, where you work out each plot until the user lifts their finger.
I wonder if you could recreate signatures by examining the depth of the ink where the person lifts their pen, since that typically has the largest deposit of ink at that point, particularly with a fountain pen.
You can get a laser engraver or 3d printer for half the cost of those devices that's much more versatile.
These are based on the EBB board which uses a custom command set rather than the more common GCode command set which is the basis for most CNC machines.
If you're interested in CNC I'd recommend going with something that is based on GCode as it's much more transferable. GCode is used in everything from $100 PCB engravers up to multi-million dollar HAAS milling machines.
I appreciate the advice, but I doubt the laser engraver or 3D printer are going to hold a pen, so it wouldn’t really do what I wanted (of course they’re great to have in their own right).
There are countless examples on the internet of people adding laser engraver modules and pens to their 3d Printers. They're designed to be modified, they use an open source control language utilized by industry, unlike that pen device using a proprietary language.
The $150 laser engravers from Eleksmaker for example have an unused servo pinout on their control boards specifically for adding an accessory like an actuator for a pen. It would be trivially simple to swap out the laser module, which is held in by thumb screws, and replace it with a pen.
PSA: For those on macOS, the Preview app has taken this exact concept and built it in for a while now, and I use it all the time. Clicking and dragging on my signature has saved me countless times.
I did that once while sitting in my car all right on my phone.
I was about to go in to something I couldn't blow off, and I couldn't blow off returning the mail as soon as possible either.
But I had a Note 4 phone and a working cell connection and managed to get it all done in a few minutes right there in my drivers seat.
I think I didn't even end up using the Note4's stylus but writing the signature on paper and taking a pic.
It was a while ago so I don't remeber exactly what I did or what apps I used. I probably tried a few different things on the spot before I found something that worked. Maybe the official adobe android app had signature support like the desktop app does now, or maybe I had to do it more manually with some other combination of apps, but I know that I went from receiving an email with a pdf attachment to returning that email with my own new pdf attachment all in about 15 minutes with nothing but my phone.
I did the same years ago. I've done everything from new job paperwork to buying a house to various government forms and I've yet to have anyone refuse to accept or even comment on the fact that my signature is a pixel-perfect copy on all documents.
Somehow I am always surprised when I use a new PDF tool and discover that it, like all the others, has failed to use transparency to make signatures look right. No real signature fails to cross something already on a document, but every time we get this stupid blank box around the signature...
There is legislation in place in the EU to enable digital signing. I think it is currently only on the level of: 'signatures that meet these standards can be legally binding if the contract allows for digital signatures'. I also do believe there is a system to allow countries to do identity attestation. That is, countries will assert that, indeed, this key belongs to this name.
> I also do believe there is a system to allow countries to do identity attestation
not sure about the rest of the EU, in Poland there's a thing called Trusted Profile ("Profil Zaufany") where your bank serves as an "identity provider", i.e. you basically use your online bank account to verify your identity. it's kinda weird! but after that you can use your TP to sign and submit most (?) government forms/docs so it's pretty nice
Not only governments but products that bring this to the masses. Encryption is complex and complicated, I understand why but while it is not simplified for UX, not in implementation, it will be, unfortunately, quite hard to become ubiquitous.
I've successfully bought a home by self-GPG-signing and emailing documents (even in a country that has an official (albeit horrible) 'digital signature' solution).
To add to that, At least on fedora Linux and likely everywhere else Xournal can open PDF files and you can type free form text or even scribble from within the app.
I use a pen because my Lenovo Flex 14 came with one but I imagine you could use a mouse pointer as well.
In our company we copy-paste pngs containing signatures into documents. Crazy, too. We also use cryptographic signatures for engineering processes, but most recipients prefer the bitmaps resulting from the png...
A Galaxy Note device will permanently solve this use case. I love paper, and use it (and fountain pens), but my Galaxy Note with S-Pen made the process of signing and sending legal documents far more pain-free. Open PDF, sign, re-save, send back. Done.
Owning a laser printer instead of an inkjet changes the economics of home printing drastically. Also the time savings of not having to physically go to the library to print is huge.
I have not one but two inkjet printers at home. One's an all-in-one, the other is a large format photo printer. It's been so long since I've used either that the ink is probably dried up.
On the other hand, I have a cheap laser printer and it just works. I don't print a lot. I've gotten out of the habit of printing and filing most things and just keep a PDF. But there's still a bunch of random stuff: recipes, trail maps, various things I do need to send as physical copies, etc. I don't need to print it all and could take 30 minutes to print the things I do need at Staples or wherever, but I have a home office and it's a lot easier to just print out a few pages every now and then.
Yeah laser is overwhelmingly the way to go. The only problem Ive encounteres is that the costs for wide format go through the roof. I need to print 11x17's regularly but infrequently. The solution i figured out was to get a good consumer all-in-one laser for normal size paper, and then a wideformat inkjet. I hate havung two printers, but the total cost is like $600 instead of $2500+.
My last printer was from 2 decades ago and was only used to print documents.
I kind of miss reading source code written by others on dot-matrix long sheets, you can reason around existing code in a different way than navigating through a text editor or IDE. Still not indispensable, though.
Absolutely! No better way to consume other's code than going through it on a printout!
This was the very reason I looked out for a modern dot-matrix printer, last year, only to find, that they have gotten pretty expensive (at least when compared to the InkJets and Lasers and in color, you also want more than 80 columns, etc.).
Also, what I did not find was a printer utility, that would print as many pages as still readable onto the paper, with a special emphasis on source code (hilite, etc.)
I did not purchase, however, since it is not so often, that I have to go through somebody else's full source-code.
I used to print some very long shell scripts at my previous employer when I was newly hired.
I sat there most of a morning with a rubber, a mechanical pencil and a highlighter and worked my way through the code.
It felt very good to have made sense of the whole thing to a reasonable level of detail.
I highlighted the key tokens, variables and function names and took notes on the side of the pages (sometimes in the back too).
It felt very very good.
Some of my colleagues where true masters of shellscript, some scripts were remarkable for what they achieved, along with both error checking and error recovery. I've learnt a lot that morning just by looking up commands and syntax I didn't know at the time.
Haha I thought I was the only one. When I started being interested in coding, I remember printing the code of some mIRC scripts, and later on printing, html/css files.
Everything I would learn was because it was in the source of some other program,and finding something I never seen before was a thrill.
Yes, being able to scribble on a source code listing has its advantages in the case of truly obfuscated code.
I have done it once in the last 15 years or so, only 2 years ago. Imagine the faces in the office when I worked with that source code listing in front of me :)
It seems to me that a lot of people print at work/school whenever they need to, rather than own a printer. At least that's the most common around me. Employers generally don't mind as long as it's only a few pages sometimes.
Sheet music is the one area I haven't found a good replacement for in terms of printing. All contracts and important docs I do in PDF or DocuSign or some such. But there is just no good replacement for printed sheet music.
No big enough I find. A4 sheet music is just what I'm used to. Being able to write extra notation in (finger markings for piano or practice marks) with a pencil is just so easy. Also being able to have two sheets side by side. On an iPad you're limited to one. Sure, you could buy two, but then what if your score is 4 pages long? You have to either do split PDFs or swipe multiple times on the other one or something.
Edit: I'm sure an iPad pro might be good size and resolution wise but I couldn't justify the cost just for sheet music. Plus the multi page issue.
I once bought a scanner/printer combination for my home office. Not having to go to the print shop for every letter saves so much time, 5 euro per month is nothing compared to that.
Printing is not overrated. I like paper, its reads that much easier. These days all in one laser printers are cheap, of good quality and they print for low €/sheet.
Personally I have great experiences with Brother on Linux. Brother has well-maintained Linux drivers, recommended.
Using CUPS on my Linux machines has always been an exercise in frustration. Installing the proprietary brother drivers using their shell script always just works. I wish they had drivers for ARM though so I could use a raspberry pi for sharing the printer instead of my Intel server.
You’re at a disadvantage today if you prefer reading on paper, it’s too slow. I’ve tried to go back to paper and I can’t. The information density is low and it’s too hard to maneuver paper quick enough to make up for that. Computers create a “Mary Poppins bag” of information that would take huge desks and rooms to match.
I've been working on printer related technology for my whole career and I almost never print anything. Ask any IT person the technology they least like dealing with and they will all say printers.
But my small-ish company owns several, and in my country it is basically essential...
A major reason to have a printer here, is that if you do ANY, and I mean ANY business, you need to file a electronic form with the government, and print a physical copy.
The reason for this, is that we have a transportation tax, and if the road police stops you, you must have the printed document on you to show to the cop the goods you are transporting had the tax paid.
Weirdly a lot of people DO NOT know that it is the road police that is the intended readers of the document, so the information that is relevant to them is often wrong (people file price, tax, etc... correctly, and then put random values in volume amount, weight, size, registration plate of vehicle, etc...) then they get surprised the police seizes their stuff.
And many just don't print it, and assume sending to the digital document is enough. (it is not, a cop in the middle of nowhere might not have internet to check on the official servers the document, and thus he will want the paper copy that he can read with a flashlight)
Yes, people don't realize that truckers (who are transporting goods and equipment) still use paper a lot for official permits and info. In my country, they were among the earliest demographics to adopt pagers, then mobile phones, but at the same time, they all have a steel clipboard that opens to a storage compartment for a stack of paper permits (one or more for every state in the USA you are driving across), log sheets (for state and federal government, job sites, etc). And while you must file things with some government offices electronically, you better have the paper copy for the cops and Department of Transportation inspectors in various states as well as for mandatory road-scale-houses on interstate highways.
I'm with you. I wish CUPS would not be installed by default. I'm curious if most people print in 2020. I don't either. In Japan you can print via USB stick, sd-card, wifi, cloud, etc at pretty much every convenience store and there's usually one close by. where I live there is one 1 minute way, another 2 minutes, another 2.5 minutes, another 4 minutes, and probably 10 more within 10 minutes. I know that's less common in other places but I did use the printer at a library in SF so I know they have (had?) those services too
In any case I uninstall CUPS when I install a new installation of linux because, at least in the past, I'd see tons of files updated all the time every update all related to cups, something I wasn't using at all.
I don't. CUPS does not harm (it's lightweight and quiet), and I don't want to have to install it or configure it if I ever need to use a printer. Drivers should be installed automatically too, so I don't have to think about it. I install whatever mainstream distro, connect to whatever printer there is at the place I am with my laptop and it should just work. People have other things to do than (finding out how to) configure a printer and install packages for that.
Distros cannot assume people will know in advance what printer they will need to use with a laptop. For a desktop computer, it's slightly different, but still, common things just need to work out of the box, life is too short for fiddling for most people (I like fiddling though, but only when I choose to do it).
On less mainstream / more KISS distros, it would be okay (better) not to install CUPS by default though.
> In Japan you can print via USB stick, sd-card, wifi, cloud, etc at pretty much every convenience store
So you walk 1 minute to the convenience store, spend a minute fiddling with the plug, another few trying to go through the menu. Finally get your print, and walk a minute back. Say it takes 10 minutes total.
Meanwhile I just press print and in less than 10s my printout is on my desk.
I can see why some people don’t need a printer, but I need one often enough that walking to the conbini and doing that dance is a major PITA.
Inkjet printers are not reliable well because sometimes ink clogging or something bad is happen if I don't use frequently. Using printers in convenience store is no hassle.
Personally nearest convenience store is not near so I have an inkjet printer.
> In Japan you can print via USB stick, sd-card, wifi, cloud
Yep. Even if you need to own a printer, lots of modern printers for office or home also offer those options. For 99% of the cases it's just as good as printing from the computer.
This is how it should be, IMO. CUPS is ok, but I would rather never have to install any software related to HP, Epson or Canon on my machine, let alone a driver.
Microsoft Teams brings its own potential problems, of course, but faxes are pretty insecure, both because of the transfer medium (they're typically unencrypted and easy to tap) and because they inherently involve making paper copies of sensitive data that should never be put on paper in the first place.
I remember seeing an HN comment from someone who runs an online fax thing. I wish I had saved the comment when I saw it. Basically you can just fax stuff from your computer for a small fee.
I used to do that for my own company just for our own customers to use via our software.
It was just a single T1 line in a data center with a linux box with a Dialogic T1 card installed, running HylaFax+.
This got us 24 high speed fax lines on an internet connected server, and all the application servers sent jobs to it via the regular hylafax+ client (which is like a slightly customized ftp)
The users didn't use the fax lines directly to send arbitrary files or prints from their desktops, they just used our software which had the option to fax things it generated. For some years there were several thousand end users and back end automated processes generating tons of faxes 24/7 and it hardly ever scratched the surface of that T1, because it often sent the faxes faster than the traditional 9600. Many times the receiving machine could receive at 14.4, and sometimes even at 19.2 or 33.6, and the server queing up the jobs and using all 24 lines could chew through a lot fast, so even when there was a lot of jobs, they didn't pole up much.
That wasn't a generic service but an integrated one, but it's only a small step from there to having a generic email-to-fax gateway/service, or a web front end, or even a virtual printer driver that faxes instead.
I used to use a generic service like that for a while also. Not one I made, someone else's service. Unity Fax, later renamed to fax.com. It worked like I just said, you could send and receive by email, or through their web site. They gave you your own phone number that anyone sending a fax to that number was sent to your email (or your inbox on the web site).
The problem is medical related stuff can be quite sensitive and a rando fax internet service could easily be looking at the images you fax and saving the interesting ones.
Also in the US, apparently. A company I used to work for didn't have a fax machine until we opened a US office; then suddenly we needed one, as a lot of paperwork had to be faxed. This was about 10 years ago, I suppose; maybe it's better now.
barely? I haven't used a fax machine in Japan in > 10yrs. 20yrs ago it was indispensable. For example you wanted to go somewhere you'd have the store/museum/etc fax you a map.
But, yes, Japan is behind the times many ways. It's apparently on the government agenda to modernize. Social distancing has made it clear that requiring personal stamps to stamp papers has to be replaced by something else.
Printing on windows and macos has been pretty stagnant for years. Windows printing is still a pretty awful experience; the print queue gets jammed and windows is really slow to unclog. The worst part is finding and updating drivers. MacOS printing does a lot better with drivers and clogged queues but it too could still use some work.
It's too bad there doesn't seem to be much industry support for a common, open driver system. PS was a good try but seems Adobe licenses killed that one. Similar with PCL and HP. There was a glimmer of hope with XPS years ago but that quickly fizzled.
Then you cannot remove the "to be printed" documents and have to kill the spool service...thats a problem since Win2K..shame on you Microsoft PUUUUUUU!
Now don't quote me on this but I think you pronounce it:
Ffs Microsoft get your shit together, windows may be dead to you but there a over a million running systems that you bought your way into. So sit up straight in your chair and get through that decade long backlog...
By a common, open driver system, do you perhaps mean "driverless"? My new printer works perfectly on Linux but took quite a bit of fiddling to get to work on Windows. Scanning from iOS is a mess (the official app works, but it has a hardcoded list of integrations instead of proper "share" support, so actually using the scanned results is a pain). I haven't even tried scanning from Windows.
And the very best part: on Fedora 32 or better, scanning Just Works! This is the result of a project to implement both Microsoft's and Apple's scanning protocols in SANE, and somehow the result seems substantially better than Apple or Microsoft's implementations.
PCL5 is well supported in my experience. PCL6 on more modern printers. Compared to Linux, the Windows printing experience is easy. 99.9% of the time, you go into your settings, click on devices, click on "add device" and wait for the printer to show up (usually within 30 seconds, sometimes takes 2-3 minutes). Then you click that and you can print. That is the 99.9% case.
On Linux you're way less lucky if you wanna print, god forbid the document is more complex than a text file.
? Connect printer, print? That's been my general experience, and we've also been printing through Linux at work for decades now - and with CUPS about since it arrived. The number of printers we've been through I have lost count of, but they work. We print all kind of documents, at sometimes an industrial scale. And of course it doesn't matter what the document is, pure text or not.
At the home front the HP printers "just work", the only slightly tricky one was a Ricoh laser printer I was given - it doesn't use PS or PCL but instead its own system. That needed a 3rd party driver.
Printers are one of those corners of linux that still resemble the winmodem days: if it works right away it just works, but if it doesn't, you're probably out of luck. That's because drivers are key and manufacturers have little incentive to keep updated drivers in CUPS - particularly for cheaper models and cheaper brands. Industrial-grade models and brands are more likely to have had a driver done for some reason or another (big contract in civil service etc).
I bought a Lexmark Laser Printer a while ago. CUPS doesn't recognize this printer automatically, you have to add it manually. So you have to go through a dialog that is basically user hostile and I can't imagine how many people with less technical knowledge give up here.
Regardless of using PCL6 or the Lexmark driver from Lexmark, the printer continues to be unable to print PDFs directly from the browser. Other PDF viewers print normally. CUPS logs no error but prints it on a piece of paper instead.
When attempting to view the print queue of my printer, it crashes if a document is being sent but has not started pritning yet. It is fine if the document is queued but not printing.
Sometimes, CUPS doesn't print the document immediately but waits 30 minutes. Other documents sent to the queue in the mean time print immediately. Sometimes the program that attempts to print causes a hard lockup in CUPS, so I have to restart the CUPS service.
"Connect printer" isn't the easiest in CUPS if it decides that autodiscovery doesn't do it, which it often does.
Great anecdote, but I have at least a thousand stories like this in Windows.
My favorite one is how a guy in my office one day was not able to print. Well he could print, but only from applications that used the really, really old Windows printing API. So basically you could print from Notepad, and that was it.
We tried everything to get printing to work, but could not figure out the problem. This led to a wipe and reload of the OS. After I got it reloaded, I tested out printing, and it worked great. Success!
Next day, he comes in and is again not able to print. Turns out that the problem was due to the drivers from his personal HP printer at home. The printer was auto-detected, and Windows automatically downloaded the new driver for that printer. That somehow fucked up the entire printing subsystem again so no printers would work at all.
That may have been the intent but my experience is that I still need to install drivers to get this to either work at all or work with all the features of the device.
My main issues when I owned inkjets is the printhead alignment is programmed in the drivers and when your printer gets old the printhead dont align anymore and you get a printer that still prints but pretty useless.
AirPrint is a just a brand name applied to the Internet Printing Protocol, although it uses Bonjour for discovery.
Kind of like Microsoft's brand new "Universal Print" is a brand name applied to the Internet Printing Protocol, although it uses Active Directory for discovery.
Google, recently announced they were killing CloudPrint to support IPP instead.
The Windows printing system is a total shit show. There are at least 3 different printing subsystems under the hood that all work differently, and none of them work particularly well.
A permissive but GPL-incompatible license unfortunately. Also, everyone was already free to develop it further as they wanted before the license change.
Apache 2.0 software is all over the place in Linux distributions. And it's probably the license that most lawyers would recommend for a permissive license. The reason it's not compatible with GPLv2 is the patent termination and indemnification provisions (in the view of the FSF). The code isn't in the kernel though.
This is 100% because Apple decided to pick up the CUPS developer. I called him after he was hired to do a story about it and he acted like I was trying to kill him . "I CAN'T TALK TO YOU!!! you're a reporter!!" Imagine that feeling being imparted like 2 days after yer hired. Also imagine how hard they made it for him to keep contributing to CUPS. I only wanted to talk about CUPS, I didn't give two shits about the Apple news, only what it meant for CUPS going forward. They never let me even speak to Apple PR about it, let alone him.
You're denigrating your primary source as a paranoid maniac on a public forum.
While also misspelling, cursing, and complaining about people declining to talk to you, the reporter.
Sounds like the CUPS developer and Apple dodged a bullet.
What development needs to be done, other than bugfixes and security once they're found? Drivers should be able to (and do) exist outside the CUPS codebase; what ever happened to code being finished?
Well, for one CUPS could be modernized. Currently CUPS is a rather poor user experience, setting up a printer is non-trivial for the average user and often enough requires digging into CUPS internals.
It's configured either via an ancient and partially broken printer applet (and with broken I mean I have a reproducible crash when trying to view my printer queue before the current print has begun printing on that printer, reported somewhere in 2015 but never fixed) or via the web interface, which is broken in different, exciting ways. Sometimes printing breaks, my browser for example cannot print, it always just prints an error message (which is not logged, it's only printed, there is no way to tell something went wrong by looking at CUPS), so all prints have to be done by another utility.
The code for CUPS isn't finished, it's a mess. The printing experience on Linux could best be described as "piss poor" if you're being nice about it. The best thing about CUPS one could say is "most of the time it'll have you printer do something that resembles printing your document".
I'm pretty confident that Ubuntu uses CUPS inside.
dpkg -l "*cups*"
seems to agree, given the number of installed packages related to CUPS.
I never had to deal with CUPS directly in all these years. I always used the GUI in Settings to find and setup printers and I never had any problem. Which distro are you using?
I use ArchLinux, so as close to upstream as it gets. The CUPS printer setup dialog, both on GNOME and KDE looks the same; it's complicated and barely usable. It hasn't changed in the past 10 years either. The bugs have persisted for almost the same time.
That's already using this hard way though, there's a great big "add" button in the top right that spots most printers automatically just like in Windows. The advanced dialog your first two links use only applies to printers that cannot be configured automatically (often because they require additional files and config that you can't just repackage without licensing issues).
I use Arch. I had to set up a network printer yesterday. I tried to add it via the Printer Manager, and it would crash every single time it tried to add the driver. This behavior persisted through a reboot.
I eventually had to USB drive it to a windows computer to print.
I would disagree. At least the gnome printer settings did not only change (for some time you had both in parallel on Fedora), they are not complicated at all?
Last time I checked, the printer dialog will first ask you what protocol to use to talk to the printer.
It lists a few common options, such as JetDirect, PCL, TCP/IP, etc. Whatever. Doesn't really matter, it's just poor UX. Most end users have no idea what any of this means and don't know what to pick. You'd possibly find out in the printer manual, though mine didn't specify what protocols it understood very clearly, it was written in Appendix B or something and not in the index at the back.
In most cases, you now enter the hostname or IP of the printer to add. While sometimes necessary on Windows, autodiscover on linux is still a shitshow and doesn't work except for HP printers. (Laser HP in Color is expensive).
On Windows, the very same printer that took me 30 minutes to setup after I wrangled it through the initial setup dialogue, took all of 20 seconds to setup; "Settings" -> "Devices" -> "Add Device" -> "Lexmark Printer". Done. It printed perfectly fine.
On the other hand, my printer to this day cannot print directly from firefox through CUPS. Only from other PDF viewers.
edit: from what I can see in a sibling comment, the add printer dialog in gnome is the same it has always been atleast up to Ubuntu 18.04, unless they made radical changes to Ubuntu 20.04 to the add printer dialog, which I don't think is the case since I haven't heard about any larger printer-related changes in 20.04
The web interface is hostile af, the standard GUI dialog to add printers is fairly hostile as well, even if you get autodiscovery to work (not always, not in all cases out of the box), it's still not friendly for average end users.
CUPS also provides a GUI-based printer configuration tool, which handles viewing your printers, their queues and setting up new printers. It looks not only old, it is old and not very user friendly.
It also exposes it's admin interface on localhost with per-distro varying defaults on it's root password.
On Archlinux only root can login by default last time I installed it. Heavily distro dependent and just weird that it requires a webinterface to configure.
> The best thing about CUPS one could say is "most of the time it'll have you printer do something that resembles printing your document".
If you're old enough to remember what printing on Linux was like in the 1990s and early 2000s, you'll recognize what a towering accomplishment the above is.
Hundreds of pieces of largely undocumented hardware with little to no manufacturer support more-or-less work most of the time!
But that's absolutely no reason why things can't continue to improve. CUPS might have been a lare improvement over the 2000s and the 90s, but it's still not great. Especially now that much more end-users are active on linux that aren't very knowledgable in computers, Linux and it's tooling, including CUPS, needs to get comfortable with the idea that, for most users, it is better to have sane defaults and work out of the box with minimal interaction, such as being able to easily add printers from autodiscovery, failing that, allowing users to add printers from an easy to understand dialog option. There is no reason why I need to select what protocol my printer needs (JetDirect, ApplePrint, PCL6, etc.) if the easiest option is to try out which ones of them work and select the one that works the best. On Windows I don't have to care how my printer talks to my computer, it autoselects from the various protocols, usually trying to identify the printer and letting the driver pick. On linux with CUPS I very much have to care and I don't see why.
If I'm in GNOME and go to Settings > Printers, then adding a printer is pretty easy actually. There's also an advanced printer configuration flow which takes in a lot of options and settings for the printer to work, but that's usually not necessary.
The web interface is my last resort before falling back to editing config manually, but you really shouldn't need it anymore.
Really, the only problem I've had with printing from Linux had to do with Xerox printers that required downloading some magic file from the Internet and then required me to install SAMBA to login to a Windows domain and then manually pick the right trays and other config for the specific model before I could print. Otherwise, it would register the printer but the printer would refuse the job with an error.
Normal network printers were just a matter of clicking "add" and selecting the printer. The entire process took way less time than the Windows printer drive install took.
Making printing work that way was a choice by the printer manufacturer, it could've been a lot easier. If this is what CUPS would need to do for me for every printer out there then I'm glad for the authors' sanity sake that they don't.
>Normal network printers were just a matter of clicking "add" and selecting the printer. The entire process took way less time than the Windows printer drive install took.
Only if cups decides to bless autodiscovery today, which often doesn't work properly for a lot of people. If you need to manually configure the protocol and IP/Host of a printer, you already lost the average end user.
Having to install SAMBA is likely to be far outside their domain.
The dialog to add printers hasn't changed much since a few more famous blog rants in 2008 or so, up to Ubuntu 18.04. It's still user-hostile unless you have some prior knowledge of linux and printer networking.
Sad to say I agree. There have been a couple of times where I received something that had to be printed, signed, and scanned back in... my printer, which I don't use much (and thus didn't bother setting up in CUPS when I installed my current distro) was not working with CUPS at all. I really didn't want to troubleshoot it at the time so I booted a Windows machine and installed the drivers.. got it taken care of. Sometime later the same kind of situation cropped up but I didn't have ready access to a Windows system.. I ended up printing the document from my iPhone (using AirPrint, didn't have to configure anything), signing it, and then using a document "scanner" app to scan it and email it back. I've since gotten CUPS to behave in that it can print, but scanning has never worked out for me there.
This however is not to be taken as an endorsement of Windows's printing prowess. Without going through the hassle of getting the specific drivers from the manufacturer Windows 10 will give you the impression that everything is stellar.. finds the printer, makes it available to print to.. and even prints!... with colors inverted. A text document with black font printed a black document with white text... just light my toner on fire why don't you?
Seconded. I'm on Fedora and it wasn't a bad experience, I had to go to the Brother website and download the drivers and run some binary blob thing as root -- not crazy about that -- but it eventually it worked.
OTOH, my Win10 work laptop found it on my wifi, connected, and was good to go in about 5 minutes. Didn't have to download, extract, and run some random vendor tarball, just said 'find" and it found.
I picked up an older Brother printer, laser, on CL recenlty and connected it to a pi zero 2 with CUPS.
Then I had to find, download, compile an implement a third party driver (that doesn't have my exact model).
It works and it's mostly on Brother for not having easy ARM/Linux drivers but still a pain. I wish I'd looked before picking up this specific model printer as I could have gone fora used Dell laser too.
I've moved from cloud print to CUPS-based printing at home just recently, and the latter has been more reliable (at least for the setup I've got; printer is not cloud-print native, so was using a raspberry pi as a print server). GCP would sporadically not respond to print jobs, then sometimes, days later, print them all out. The only annoyance is that the only PPD file for my printer is in German, so my print options are in German.
I dislike this whole "we must keep adding features and doing things" culture. Some things like CUPS or the DWM window manager have reached a point where there is nothing more to do because it does everything it is supposed to do.
It’s always surprising to me to see an article like this that’s vaguely about a person, without seemingly any attempts to reach that person for comment. I’ve filed issued on a few of Michael’s repositories since he left Apple, and he was extremely responsive. I’d be surprised if he ignored Phoronix if they had actually reached out to him.
> xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 3±1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS
at a screen resolution of 1024x1. Please enable your ad blockers, disable high-heat drying, and remove your device
from Airplane Mode and set it to Boat Mode. For security reasons, please leave caps lock on while browsing.
That's no replacement for CUPS. Far from it, it builds upon CUPS. From the page you linked:
> PAPPL requires a POSIX-compliant host operating system such as Linux®, macOS®, QNX®, or VxWorks®. It also requires the following support libraries:
> CUPS 2.2 or later for the CUPS libraries (libcups2/libcupsimage2)
Printing should have been one of the millennium problems..
Like seriously, what company provides actually decent printers? None of them do, because they’re beholden to old paranoid execs who think that their shitty printer drivers or whatever somehow represents a competitive “asset”.
It’s our economic system’s biggest flaw, that old clueless people can fuck up things beyond recognition (mostly for their younger, more informed and more educated colleagues) just because they have “seniority”, while being completely disconnected and ignorant of any relevant technologies past the fucking 1960s.
(Then, of course, they vote in fascists, and complain about young people not voting, as if that excuses the fascists they voted into office.. disgusting..)
CUPS is amazing. My old HP printer (no longer supported in Windows) works in Linux, but it also works from Windows, and even from iOS devices via AirPrint. This is something that's impossible in any other printing system that I know of. Whoever took CUPS this far has my eternal gratitude.
It's 2020 and printer manufacturers still haven't settled on a standard printer interface.
I remember once buying a mouse and having to install a driver for it. Then one day, the mouse manufacturers all agreed to use a single interface. Now I can plug in any mouse and it just works without even having to download a driver.
Why can't I buy a printer, plug it in and the OS sees a device with a standard print-a-page interface?
They have plenty of standards! - appsociey/jet direct, postscript, pdf , pcl, pjl , ipp, AirPrint, etc etc. Although AirPrint is pretty much just this.
The state of printers in general makes me so sad. The best printer I ever had was an HP in the late 90s. THE LATE 90S!
Since then printers still jam all the time, have ridiculously expensive ink, don't work worth a damn (or at all) with my devices (lots of Linux and Android), and all sorts of other issues, and lately they seem to have some sort of DRM that when I took our printer offline for a few months, it never came back. The internals seem completely seized up. Some Googling has shown that many suspect it bricked itself because it couldn't reach the backend service it reports to. Speculation of course, but still absolutely enraging.
I haven't printed more than a handful of pages in 10 years but my wife prints all the time. Part of me wishes she would either stop printing (not likely as she loves paper) or print enough to justify spending more money to escape the consumer printer space. In the mean time I wish I'd kept that HP from the 90s. Donating that and thinking things would only get better with time was a huge mistake. D-:
The joke is good but they did just that with the LaserWriter 35 years ago.
It was revolutionary almost as much as the Macintosh (and had more computing power!).
I remember my uncle setting up a new business at the time and getting a bank loan for a Mac and the printer. It cost about the same as a new car and was worth the money.
I don't like printing but printing is indispensable (at least in US). There are many official documents you have to print, sign, scan and send. Just yesterday I had to fill out a mail order so that my office can send WFH equipment to my residence. For those who are recommending running to the nearby print-shop, it doesn't matter how close the store is, nothing beats the convenience of having a printer-scanner right next to my desk especially when it's raining or sub zero outside. These days kids are doing school from home, so I scan their art-work and upload (turns out better than taking a picture). My ten year old Brother laser printer works well with CUPS and if it were to die I'll buy a laser printer-scanner in a heartbeat. It makes life so easy having a printer-scanner at home.
Who in their right mind is going to dedicate their free time to writing printer drivers in 2020? Forking solves the problem of a poor maintainer holding up things, it doesn't just spawn interested developers out of nowhere.
Owning a few HP devices and using Linux, I’d be careful using “perfectly” in that context. It’s better than others, but for example scanning tends to fail sometimes when libraries get updated etc.
There’s a few more nitpicks around paper selection, dual side printing etc.
Are you willing to drive that project and work on patches? Because wishing upon "maybe a community fork" is just wishing that someone else should do what you expect to be done.
Maybe not a community fork, but I can think of several Linux Distro "Owners"/Communities/Companies that need a working printer service for their "products", e.g. RedHat/IBM, Suse, Canonical?
Would it be too far fetched if one of them starts maintaining/sheltering a fork - at least to fix bugs? Maybe even with the help of the other interested parties (in an ideal world)?
I cannot imagine IBM wants to sit on a Fedora Workstation release with a buggy printing service.
I hate the pressure people put on open-source developers of working for free, forever, on projects that they started. It is one of the main reasons I stopped making my side-projects open-source. All you get is a deluge of requests and complaints, some of them barely coherent, and almost zero people actually contributing back.
Maybe they don't care about it anymore. Or maybe they do but don't have the time/motivation to work on it. Some people have lives. Do you want to see changes to this project? Then fork it.
We already have decent tablets, and we're absolutely going to have decent e-ink tablets (as laggardly as the progress there has been) before we manage to get printer drivers figured out.
Still nothing beats printing a document, scribble on it and giving it to someone or putting it a stash on your desk - not even having a device being capable of doing those things digitally without hick-ups.
The two most important issues are:
- This device (possibly) stacks all of these papers you would have printed out - so they are lost in a sheer endless space of all these various documents and even worse versions thereof. And then if you start sending these versions to others, e.g. expecting feedback, all hell breaks loose.
- There is still something about sitting with a stack of papers in your hand/on your desk - no digital device involved. Most people can't focus on a digital version the same way they do on a physical paper. I'm a huge fan of the ReMarkable (2), but simply put every (even awesome) attempt so far has failed.
Then add to that all the hick-ups that are simply never to leave. Software incompatibilities, sharing tools not working with all devices, walled-gardens, ... the problems are still endless and just get worse with every tool you add.
How are you going to print exams for students? Forms for residents to fill out? We are not going to demand of every citizen to fill out everything online at all times, are we? That would leave the most vulnerable even more stranded than they are now.
My main application for paper is writing notes -- I haven't found a good digital replacement yet, but I'm open to digital paper. Having one repository of all notes would be really helpful, I think, as long as it was properly indexed. But I agree that there are areas where paper will never be beat.
Plus, I've used a wacom tablet and, while I was impressed that they managed to somewhat mimic the feeling of writing with a pen, it isn't the feeling of writing with a great pen. And nowhere near the feeling of a nice mechanical pencil. There's room for improvement.
I've experimented with trying to aim a camera at my paper, to digitize my notes. Didn't make much progress, though. The pencil and paper feeling is really hard to match.
Because that's just another shitty implementation of a print service.
There is a reason why print services are implemented on the Desktop OS and not on the printer (well I'm sure many printers do have a shitty implementation): Because there's few Desktop OSes but so many printers. You want to split the work and implement each thing where it is most efficient.
Things a print spooler should do:
- Queue print jobs, be able to watch progress, cancel them.
- Manage permissions, maybe implement quota or similar.
- Offer desktop integration in print dialogues: N-up, shrink, duplex, and other common postprocessing features. With a print dialogue, a lot of manual labor of creating temporary files and editing them with a particular application is saved.
Don't forget manage several printers. At home I only have one so this doesn't matter. At work I need to choose between one of several printers in the building. In a school lab: students want to print and have whichever of the 3 identical printers right next to each other print it, depending on which printer isn't busy with some other student's work.
Some (professional ones, e.g. Canon) do - additionally to offering other interfaces.
But let me tell you, it is terrible not being able to print from your system dialogue.
Then there is IPP and LPD/LPR. But those are either limited and sometimes the results not ideal (LPD), or again rely on a driver on your system to access the features of your printer (IPP) e.g. double sided printing, toner levels, print quality, etc.
I would like to see a printer that is indistinguishable from a box of A4 paper (2500 sheets).
In the lid of this imaginary printing solution is the printing gubbins with the ink needed for reasonable coverage on the included paper, plus the circuitry needed for wifi/bluetooth/Chrome web printing.
When the box is done it should email you to arrange for it to be replaced, with recycling part of the deal. Its replacement also arrives just in the cardboard box such as what you get with 2500 sheets of paper, so no huge polystyrene packing and no plastic in the printer housing, that being cardboard.
In this design double sided is not going to happen or any other paper sizes apart from A4. It no longer competes in aspects of versatility, nobody cares about its printer driver, no ink cartridges have to be bought, the internals are only good for 2500 sheets and it just works.
Kind of makes sense, printing is not exactly a killer feature for macOS anymore--more like a tolerated necessity of office users--and any improvements would likely be needed in the proprietary UI layer, not the underlying CUPS codebase.
Never been a big CUPS fan as it tends to be a pain to set up. These days good old lpr is more than enough for the amount of printing required. The printer can keep all its fancy features and not bother me with them.
“In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2. In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code. On December 20, 2019 Michael Sweet announced on his blog that he had left Apple.” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS)
https://github.com/OpenPrinting/cups
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoron...