[GTALUG] Continuing Printer Woes

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, 1 Jun 2020 at 09:26, Peter King via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> Sad days when people who voluntarily use Linux and are tech-savvy just
> give up on printing -- printing! -- because it isn't worth the effort.
> There shouldn't *be* any effort by now; it's 2020, for goodness sakes.
>

I guess I'm surprised a bit by this; my experiences have some parallels
and non-parallels...

Once upon a time, I did really scary printer hacking, had a project where
I built a component that would put bitmaps of peoples' signatures into
documents in a print queue so that printed reports would have the
Lovely Signatures.  There was a step weirder; one of the print queues
went to a fax machine, as the task was sending price sheets out to
customers (with the Lovely Signature at the bottom).  That was, like
circa 1992.

At that time, interoperability with printers and Linux was very much
fraught with troubles.  Those were the days of WinModems and
WinPrinters where Microsoft was trying to capture market by
making sure that lots of devices would ONLY talk to Windows(tm)

Then, some time in the 20-oughts, (after 2000), I encountered CUPS
and had the "breath of fresh air" of it being pretty much dead easy to
configure printer usage on Linux.  Each time I have gotten a new PC
at work has been a point in time where I configured CUPS to talk to
a couple of our printers.

And my reaction, of late, has been, "It Just Works(tm)"   After the
old scar tissue from the '90s, it has been just totally easy.   I kinda
suspect I have had things Dialed To Easy, in view that what I'm
inevitably connecting to are networked printers that were to a degree
selected to be simple for our varied platform staff (a few Windows,
quite a lot of MacOS, and quite a lot of Linux) to connect to, so
that I'm not treading any ground that's new to anyone local.

But I had gotten myself accustomed to the impression that
"with CUPS, It Just Works(tm)", so colour me surprised.

Has Microsoft pushed back to try to get WinPrinters back to be a
thing?  I'm curious as to what may have worsened in the last few
years.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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