Has anyone had luck or experience with using IPP for printing from Linux? A standard networking protocol for printing sounds like it should make a lot of these problems mute.
My printer used to integrate perfectly with windows 11. I was using some Ancient driver I found on some internet archive. windows updater found a new drive, now it’s a mess of different UIs to print or scan shit
CUPS is horrible, and also had its share of critical vulnerabilities. It is just better than the LPD mess we had before.
It is not a Linux specific thing - it was developed when there still were a lot of UNIX variants around. Apple was a very early contributor, and had quite a bit of influence in making it successful.
It’s no surprise Apple uses CUPS. They wrote it, after all.
Edit: TIL Apple didn’t write CUPS themselves but they bought the company that did it pretty early in the game. Here’s a LWN article from the time, exposing some of the worries that came with the news of the acquisition: lwn.net/Articles/242020/
At my workplace we have sketchy-looking unsigned Applescripts to install printers on Macs. You have to find the right file for the printer you want to install, and run it, or ask IT to do it for you.
It’s not ideal, but everyone that tries to improve the printing experience ends up ragequitting. Last I heard, someone in IT was looking into some sort of “print anywhere” solution where you just install one virtual printer driver and print to it, then scan your badge at any printer to see all your print jobs and print them. Not sure what the status is with that though - haven’t heard about it for a while.
I thought I saw that Mac has the same CUPS print service/printer manager that Linux uses? In fact it seems like apple developed it. I think that helps enormously with standardizing printer configs. www.cups.org/doc/admin.html
I think it does; it’s just automated installation of new printers that’s an issue as far as I know. Not 100% sure since I’m a software developer rather than an IT support person, so I never deal with stuff like that.
Enterprise grade MFD printers often have a lot of features that don’t get detected/mapped automatically, such as finishing options like staples and folding, as well as color management. I’m not a printer expert, I try to avoid them when possible, but I know that mass deploying those specific configurations in a safe and sane way seems basically impossible.
On the Fedora-based Linux machines, however, all of that seems to just pop in automatically, so I don’t think it’s a CUPS problem.
No joke, printing is like the #1 thing I like most about switching from Windows to Linux. I still get errors about the bypass tray every time I try to print from Windows. I’M NOT USING THE BYPASS TRAY!
I have a pair of LaserJet 2200dn printers, they work absolutely fine in any Linux distro but I just have to make sure to use the below driver in my case:
HP LaserJet 2200 Foomatic/lj4dith (grayscale, 2-sided printing)
If I use the default or hpcups drivers it takes fucking forever (over an hour!) to process the pages. Essentially if given the option go for the lj4dith driver for your LaserJet
With cups it’s pretty much painless on linux form me, though some distros have a very restrictive firewall configuration out of the box, so you have to whitelist it before using. Not too complicated, but can be very frustrating for new users who never touched a firewall before.
On linux i was able to setup my hp laserjet no problem, cups recognised it just fine; the problem is with the integrated scanner, SANE sees that there is some sort of scanner but fails to talk to it, i have windows 10 installed on a usb key essentially only to use the scanner
Yeah I switched to LMDE a couple months ago and I plugged in my printer for the first time but long ago. I was worried it wouldn’t work at first but it started printing right away!
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