7 ms·
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 i
by cosmotic 6y ago
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.
- ashtonkem 6y agoEven AirPrint seems to fail with pretty distressing regularity for me.
- djxfade 6y agoIsn't AirPrint just CUPS over Bonjour?
- GeekyBear 6y agoAirPrint 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.
- tannhaeuser 6y agoHasn't Apple been a major adopter of/contributor to CUPS?
- saagarjha 6y agoApple owns the code to CUPS. They hired Sweet, the author, and got the code as well.
- usr1106 6y agoOwn and own. They have licensed it under a permissive open source license https://www.cups.org/blog/2017-11-07-cups-license-change.html https://www.cups.org/blog/2017-11-07-cups-license-change.htm... so everyone would be free to develop it further as they want.
- pabs3 6y agoA permissive but GPL-incompatible license unfortunately. Also, everyone was already free to develop it further as they wanted before the license change.
- usr1106 6y agoWhat would change in the current situation had they used a GPL-compatible permissive license?
- pabs3 6y agoIt wouldn't change the development situation, but Linux distros wouldn't have lots of GPL violations and be ignoring those GPL violations.
- ghaff 6y agoApache 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.
- xenophonf 6y agoHow is it GPL-incompatible when the CUPS project explicitly made exceptions to the Apache 2.0 License for GPL compatibility?
- efreak 6y ago
- zaarn 6y agoPCL5 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.
- Tor3 6y ago? 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.
- zaarn 6y agoI 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.
- 6y ago
- nix23 6y ago> the print queue gets jammed 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!
- KingOfCoders 6y agoRecently at my father in laws Win10 machine. Had to get there to fix it so he can print again #2020
- buddhiajuke 6y agoHow is PUUUUU pronounced?
- timfi 6y agoNow 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...
- nix23 6y ago>How is PUUUUU pronounced? Like Booo but more firmly ;)
- nobleach 6y agoAh, spoolsv.exe my old friend.....
- ezconnect 6y agoMy 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.
- AnssiH 6y ago> It's too bad there doesn't seem to be much industry support for a common, open driver system. Isn't Internet Printing Protocol pretty much that, and supported by most printers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol
- cosmotic 6y agoThat 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.
- VonGuard 6y agoOn the bright side, I can print reliably from Linux now, which is the first time I've been able to do that since 2005. Thanks Greg Kroah-Hartman!
- olyjohn 6y agoThe 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.
- amluto 6y agoBy 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.