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Comment by tehabe | Hacker News Reader

I remember lpd with some horror and was very glad when CUPS came along, made printing on Linux even easier than on Windows.

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Printing in Windows is frustrating because the printer manufacturers insist on including their shite user space tools. It's often difficult to get "just the driver, thank you" without all the cruft.

The Windows driver setup seems fairly rich and well done otherwise. Though I do have to occasionally run services.msc to bounce the spooler when it has a stale idea of printer state...like "out of paper".

Often you can unzip them and look for a subfolder containing the .inf files and install those directly.

This was the best trick I had when I was using Windows, for ALL drivers I can extract. No bloatware, no weird apps on the background.

> Though I do have to occasionally run services.msc to bounce the spooler when it has a stale idea of printer state...

Especially for networked printers that is annoying! If I forgot to turn on my printer it always needs this trickery to get Windows to realise I've now actually turned it on.

Seems trivial, right? Like checking in every 30 seconds or so. I imagine there's a guy at Microsoft that keeps trying to check in the simple fix but keeps being thwarted.

Probably blocked by the guys that also said "Hey, you know what printers need? TONS of xml and SOAP. Yea. Printers should only be found by UPNP and controlled via SOAP."

Then WSD Printers were born.

I feel like lpd is quite a bit simpler than cups and I still use it.

If I had to use CUPS to print from a printer, I would get rid of the printer.

I’m totally amazed: at my Dpt. people (windows) have to print using a specific driver because otherwise they “cannot”. Their prints get logged (uid).

I just lpr and that is it. Log: “user”.... It is a postscript printer.

Sometimes they cannot print because the authentication server is down...

I recently also suffered through some horrors with Cups. A new version was released, and old drivers didn't work together with it. And the manufacturer (Samsung, which sold its printer business to HP) didn't provide updated drivers, of course. So I'm happy to have some reliable facility to at least print PostScript. But Cups is fine if you get a proper and current driver for your printer.

I imagine being a CUPS maintainer is not a good experience. They did something great, but probably only hear from end users when they are frustrated and not inclined to be civil.

Doesn’t Apple maintain CUPS?

Maybe? Wikipedia says

"In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2.[6] In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.[7] On December 20, 2019 Michael Sweet announced on his blog that he had left Apple.[8]"

I hope they recognize it’s a little bit important. A lot of their users still produce paper.

On his blog post he mentioned that there are still 2 other apple engineers working on CUPS, and that Apple still very much owns the code.

I can’t imagine it going away anytime soon.

They use it in every device they sell that can print (iOS and macOS), so it's pretty important for them.

That's not just cups but for every other printer/environment when a product loses support.

Maybe it's better now, but CUPS used to be a nightmare. I still avoid it whenever possible. Eric Raymond did a good job of describing just how bad it was.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

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