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Comment by _lbaq | Hacker News Reader

I agree, I love Fedora 23 and Gnome, except for those 2-3 times a month I actually need to print a document and do not have 7 hours to spare....

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I was actually impressed by GNOME the last time I had to print. It found the required driver in seconds, downloaded it in a few instants, and I was ready to print. Compared to Windows where I had to search during half an hour the driver on the HP website and it installed 350 megabytes of crapware.

(of course it's not the same experience for all printers, my 15 years old printer works perfectly on Windows and Linux, and I can't install a network Ricoh printer on Windows or Linux)

The high water mark of Linux printers was the HP Laserjet 4...

Printing is so much easier to do on Linux than on Windows now. I think at some point a group of people must have decided that they weren't going to be the butt of any more jokes about printing, and decided to completely fix it.

Setting up my home printer under Windows takes me the best part of 30 minutes every single time I need to do it. Under Linux its detected automatically, and works first time.

That group of people was Apple. They threw their weight behind the CUPS project in the early 2000s, hired the main developer, and continued to finance its development.

I'd completely forgotten about Apple's involvement with CUPS, but that does explain a lot. Between that and Bonjour/Zeroconf early 2000s Apple made my home networking life so much easier.

I use a brother printer with debian and I haven't even thought about printing being an issue. It works.

Hang on to that, its a keeper !

I have very inexpensively kept two kids printing over most of their entire school careers with Epsons, recently with an NX330 wireless all-in-one which just works and refillable carts. I can only remember one clog/cleaning issue, but a new cart resolved it.

I was in the market to buy a printer that I wanted to use with Linux. I looked at the compatibility chart for Epson printers. Every single one is supported. Made my life easy. True to form, it worked out of the box. Avahi found it. Used the Cups web interface to install the driver. No issues.

On the topic of supported platforms, when I bought a new laptop, I went with Toshiba because, at least with the Japanese models, every single one supports Linux.

The fact that I can buy new, off the shelf equipment and have it work on Linux with no issues is really what is new for me. You still have to do your homework, but I remember the days of having to look around for used equipment to make sure that it would work with Linux. Those days seems to be over.

I have a million problems on my Fedora, printing is not one of them. It's almost zero-configuration.

I wish all OSes were that easy wrt printing setup.

+1 Exactly this!

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