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
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.
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 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)
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.
Brother printers are your best bet. And maybe try sudo.
Agreed, heard this many times. Finally pulled trigger and brought one this year.
Print from linux? Print from android? Print from Mac? Print from windows?
Yes! Mother fucking yes! All out of box and easy to install.
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.
Did you bite the bullet and go and print something the next day?
Hand written signs ftw
If it makes you feel any better I’m 99% sure I’d have done the same thing.
Now that brother, is storytelling.
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.
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!
“Can someone help me figure out how to print a file?”
“Pft, why would you want to?”
Lmaoà, so what’s the story behind this? I’m on Tumbleweed and the joke here is that the default security/firewall settings are what make printing difficult. Not sure myself—havent had to print anything yet.
What makes it difficult on Arch?
My guess is that it doesn’t do much that you don’t specifically tell it to, so you have to manually configure printing at some point.
I don’t know of anything specifically, just my experience with printers on linux is they either work pretty effortlessly or they’re awful and don’t seem to work correctly no matter what you do.
I’ve had some pretty great experience with my Brother multifunction printer / scanner on my Ubuntu server, but never played with Arch.
Best part about Brother’s scanner driver is that it literally just runs a shell script you can modify. I have it set up such that I can scan to PDF from the printer & it will programmatically drop it into my samba share, despite the fact that my printer is not expensive enough to come with the “scan to nas” feature in firmware.
The main thing base Arch doesn’t install is a bootloader and graphical environment. I think most of the time installing a DE also installs the various tools that may be missing from a fresh Arch install.
In any case, I’ve never had trouble printing on Arch or Arch derivatives. Try following the Arch wiki article on CUPS. So long as you install CUPS I really don’t see what printer problems could be attributed to Arch rather than problems with your printer and CUPS on Linux
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.
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)
I’m new to Linux and was struggling to print from LibreOffice the other day because my printer suddenly wasn’t listed.
Hi, yeah, the printer wasn’t plugged into the computer.
see, this is why you linux cultists just cannot sway people, you’re all pushing this insane operating system that can’t even print to a printer that’s powered off in a block of concrete launched to orbit a distant star and be a russel’s teapot to drive any aliens sending probes out mad.
It’s supposed to be in Kernel 7.0
They are working on a pipewire plugin for that
uh huh. i bet you need to open powershull to do that though, dont you? or does linux not even HAVE powershall?
I know you’re joking, but powershell is actually available on linux lmao
satire is dead.
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.
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
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
Printing works out of the box most of the time on Linux. However, if it doesn’t work it really doesn’t work
That’s the problem, then. They keep checking their printer for the printed pages, when they’re really coming out of the box.
That’s like all the things on Linux haha.
One day my display randomly stopped working. That was a fun week of debugging lol
