4 ms·

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 enou

by zaarn 6y ago

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".

blaser-waffle 6y ago
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.
barumi 6y ago
> Currently CUPS is a rather poor user experience, (...) Isn't CUPS an infrastructure service that exposes a bunch of APIs for downstream consumers, such as desktop environments, to build upon?
- zaarn 6y ago
  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.
  - steerablesafe 6y ago
    Users in the lpadmin group can log in with their own passwords. At least on Debian.
    - zaarn 6y ago
      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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
pmontra 6y ago
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?
- zaarn 6y ago
  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.
  - bipson 6y ago
    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?
    - zaarn 6y ago
      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
ForHackernews 6y ago
> 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!
- zaarn 6y ago
  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.
jeroenhd 6y ago
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.
- zaarn 6y ago
  >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.
refracture 6y ago
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?

by zaarn 6y ago

blaser-waffle 6y ago

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.

barumi 6y ago

> Currently CUPS is a rather poor user experience, (...) Isn't CUPS an infrastructure service that exposes a bunch of APIs for downstream consumers, such as desktop environments, to build upon?

zaarn 6y ago
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.
- steerablesafe 6y ago
  Users in the lpadmin group can log in with their own passwords. At least on Debian.
  - zaarn 6y ago
    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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

pmontra 6y ago

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?

zaarn 6y ago
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.
- bipson 6y ago
  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?
  - zaarn 6y ago
    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

ForHackernews 6y ago

> 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!

zaarn 6y ago
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.

jeroenhd 6y ago

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.

zaarn 6y ago
>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.

refracture 6y ago

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?