No software is guaranteed to run on all platforms: the developers choose to make it available or not.
I did some quick googling, and it seems fairly easy to install it:
Use Ubuntu (if you’re not familiar with, and don’t want to be familiar with terminal basics), and install chirp from the Ubuntu App store. Snap is just a name of their package format, and their app store links to snap craft.
If you’re not using Ubuntu, that’s your choice, you’ll either have to install snap, then do the same, but it’s more work. Or play with the terminal just a bit to follow their instructions.
Details
If you’re on Ubuntu or have snap installed - it’s a one click operation to install chirp: snapcraft.io/chirp-snap
Proprietary snap store backend that is controlled by Canonical: that’s it.
I used Ubuntu for years: installed it for family and friends. I moved away around a year ago.
Moving packages like Firefox to snap was what first started annoying me.
If the backend was open source, and the community could have hosted their own (like how flatpak repositories can be), I might have been slightly more forgiving.
Did a quick Google to find if someone had elaborated, here’s a good one:
It is certainly useful for some use cases such as network print servers (I have a dedicated lxc container on the network to do this) and custom conversions of pages (during my digging, I learned about companies using a CUPS network printer to watermark every document being printed).
I’m not an expert by any means: it is definitely a useful tool in certain cases, but oh man… the documentation was a bit hard to figure out for me!
Mission Accomplished! My printer driver now has a MirrorPrint Option, and selecting it enables Mirror Printing. For convenience (since I don’t see a client side option to flip mirror printing), I have a doppleganger of my regular printer, and I named it MirrorTest - screenshot below. When I need a mirror print, I just send it to the mirror printer.
Here’s the relevant excerpt (added) in /etc/cups/ppd/MirrorTest.ppd (I added this UI option right below the Toner option). Excerpt adds a MirrorPrint Toggle (boolean) to the printer defaults setup. When enabled - the printer will print in mirror mode.
For further convenience (making sure that a new printer installation didn’t mess up my custom changes, I also updated the relevant ppd file in /usr/share/cups/model/. Whenever you add a new printer - CUPS will use the corresponding model ppd as a base, and it will apply any settings changes from configuring default to the copied ppd file in /etc/cups/ppd/your_printer.ppd.
Hope this helps if someone else is also looking to do something similar!