I have never owned a printer. When my daughter got old enough to ask why don't we have a printer I said: Whenever you want to print, go to the library and I'll give you the money for printing, there is no limit. For some reason the whole family's printing budget has never exceeded 5 Euros per year in the last 20 years. Distance to the library cannot be the reason, it is 1 minute from school. I worked in a paperless company for many years, where the printer was locked to print only contracts and similar documents.<p>While printing is overrated, of course the library printer needs a driver, too. And preferably open source in true Stallman spirit (I'm not a big Stallman fan, but wasn't it so that the whole Free Software movement started because of a closed source printer driver?). But as a domain of little general importance, I am not surprised about the lack of a thriving community.
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.<p>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.
This is 100% because Apple decided to pick up the CUPS developer. I called him after he was hired to do a story about it and he acted like I was trying to kill him . "I CAN'T TALK TO YOU!!! you're a reporter!!" Imagine that feeling being imparted like 2 days after yer hired. Also imagine how hard they made it for him to keep contributing to CUPS. I only wanted to talk about CUPS, I didn't give two shits about the Apple news, only what it meant for CUPS going forward. They never let me even speak to Apple PR about it, let alone him.
What development needs to be done, other than bugfixes and security once they're found? Drivers should be able to (and do) exist outside the CUPS codebase; what ever happened to code being finished?
I dislike this whole "we must keep adding features and doing things" culture. Some things like CUPS or the DWM window manager have reached a point where there is nothing more to do because it does everything it is supposed to do.
It’s always surprising to me to see an article like this that’s vaguely about a person, without seemingly any attempts to reach that person for comment. I’ve filed issued on a few of Michael’s repositories since he left Apple, and he was extremely responsive. I’d be surprised if he ignored Phoronix if they had actually reached out to him.
A commenter on the post points out that the author seems to be writing a replacement for CUPS <a href="https://www.msweet.org/pappl/" rel="nofollow">https://www.msweet.org/pappl/</a>
Printing should have been one of the millennium problems..<p>Like seriously, what company provides actually decent printers? None of them do, because they’re beholden to old paranoid execs who think that their shitty printer drivers or whatever somehow represents a competitive “asset”.<p>It’s our economic system’s biggest flaw, that old clueless people can fuck up things beyond recognition (mostly for their younger, more informed and more educated colleagues) just because they have “seniority”, while being completely disconnected and ignorant of any relevant technologies past the fucking 1960s.<p>(Then, of course, they vote in fascists, and complain about young people not voting, as if that excuses the fascists they voted into office.. disgusting..)
CUPS is amazing. My old HP printer (no longer supported in Windows) works in Linux, but it also works from Windows, and even from iOS devices via AirPrint. This is something that's impossible in any other printing system that I know of. Whoever took CUPS this far has my eternal gratitude.
Looks like the main developer is working on something to replace it?<p><a href="https://www.msweet.org/pappl/" rel="nofollow">https://www.msweet.org/pappl/</a>
It's 2020 and printer manufacturers still haven't settled on a standard printer interface.<p>I remember once buying a mouse and having to install a driver for it. Then one day, the mouse manufacturers all agreed to use a single interface. Now I can plug in any mouse and it just works without even having to download a driver.<p>Why can't I buy a printer, plug it in and the OS sees a device with a standard print-a-page interface?
The state of printers in general makes me so sad. The best printer I ever had was an HP in the late 90s. THE LATE 90S!<p>Since then printers still jam all the time, have ridiculously expensive ink, don't work worth a damn (or at all) with my devices (lots of Linux and Android), and all sorts of other issues, and lately they seem to have some sort of DRM that when I took our printer offline for a few months, it never came back. The internals seem completely seized up. Some Googling has shown that many suspect it bricked itself because it couldn't reach the backend service it reports to. Speculation of course, but still absolutely enraging.<p>I haven't printed more than a handful of pages in 10 years but my wife prints all the time. Part of me wishes she would either stop printing (not likely as she loves paper) or print enough to justify spending more money to escape the consumer printer space. In the mean time I wish I'd kept that HP from the 90s. Donating that and thinking things would only get better with time was a huge mistake. D-:
I don't like printing but printing is indispensable (at least in US). There are many official documents you have to print, sign, scan and send. Just yesterday I had to fill out a mail order so that my office can send WFH equipment to my residence. For those who are recommending running to the nearby print-shop, it doesn't matter how close the store is, nothing beats the convenience of having a printer-scanner right next to my desk especially when it's raining or sub zero outside. These days kids are doing school from home, so I scan their art-work and upload (turns out better than taking a picture). My ten year old Brother laser printer works well with CUPS and if it were to die I'll buy a laser printer-scanner in a heartbeat. It makes life so easy having a printer-scanner at home.
I hate the pressure people put on open-source developers of working for free, forever, on projects that they started. It is one of the main reasons I stopped making my side-projects open-source. All you get is a deluge of requests and complaints, some of them barely coherent, and almost zero people actually contributing back.<p>Maybe they don't care about it anymore. Or maybe they do but don't have the time/motivation to work on it. Some people have lives. Do you want to see changes to this project? Then fork it.
We already have decent tablets, and we're absolutely going to have decent e-ink tablets (as laggardly as the progress there has been) before we manage to get printer drivers figured out.
I would like to see a printer that is indistinguishable from a box of A4 paper (2500 sheets).<p>In the lid of this imaginary printing solution is the printing gubbins with the ink needed for reasonable coverage on the included paper, plus the circuitry needed for wifi/bluetooth/Chrome web printing.<p>When the box is done it should email you to arrange for it to be replaced, with recycling part of the deal. Its replacement also arrives just in the cardboard box such as what you get with 2500 sheets of paper, so no huge polystyrene packing and no plastic in the printer housing, that being cardboard.<p>In this design double sided is not going to happen or any other paper sizes apart from A4. It no longer competes in aspects of versatility, nobody cares about its printer driver, no ink cartridges have to be bought, the internals are only good for 2500 sheets and it just works.
Kind of makes sense, printing is not exactly a killer feature for macOS anymore--more like a tolerated necessity of office users--and any improvements would likely be needed in the proprietary UI layer, not the underlying CUPS codebase.
Never been a big CUPS fan as it tends to be a pain to set up. These days good old lpr is more than enough for the amount of printing required. The printer can keep all its fancy features and not bother me with them.
Honestly I'm happy to print at my Uni's library at this point. I just send a PDF and that's it - it's much cheaper than a personal printer anyways.