Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future | Hacker News Reader

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

lwn.net

72 pointsTomte72 comments

It absolutely enrages me that in 2021 printers are still the absolute horror show that they are. Things were better in 1999.

The article covers the driver story so I won't go into that, but in addition to the horrible Linux support it amazes me that a cheap affordable printer and ink is still not available. Ink is now not only outrageously priced but commonly has DRM in it.

I do not think it's that bad now.

A few days ago I have bought a new non original toner cartridge for my HP printer for about $7. Is it expensive tho? I expect it to print at least 2000 pages, so $0.0035 per page.

For ink jet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_ink_system

I've never actually had a problem printing in Linux. It had always been plug and play for me. My trick is to make sure the printer actually can be plugged in (USB or Ethernet) and that it isn't the most recent model.

Also, get a laserprinter. Inkjets are going to be a problem regardless of drivers.

Do you print photos? My wife loves to print photos and has been told by friends that a laser printer won't do photos.

Color laser printers are IMO even better at photos than inkjet, but many are black and white.

I would never recommend anyone buy an inkjet printer, but with special paper they do seem to produce much better output than any colour laser I’ve seen (though usually not up to the standards of photo printing robots at drug stores.)

For that use case I'd actually recommend Walmart's photo printing service, either in-store or on-line. Outsourcing makes sense in this case - the alternative would be a 7-colour inkjet printer, and the really pricey thing is replacement of the printhead when it invariably gets clogged up.

No. For photos I use a service, like a sibling suggests. Sorting out the right paper and printer is not worth it for the number of photos I wish to print, which ranges in the single digits per year. I like to get larger prints as well, which means printers would be getting quite expensive.

They don't print photos well. Unless by "loves to print photos" you mean that she wants to have complete control of the workflow from her calibrated monitor to profiled specialty papers, she's better off using a good printing service (I suggest c-prints made on photosensitive paper with Lightjet or Durst Lambda machines to most people) rather than exploring the expensive and time consuming rabbit hole of serious home printing.

> My trick is to make sure the printer actually can be plugged in (USB or Ethernet)

This article is specifically about dropping support for USB printers. Which is bananas.

I've never had any trouble with my USB-only Brother printer in linux since I bought it like a decade ago.

CUPS will need to be forked, unfortunately.

> and ink is still not available. Ink is now not only outrageously priced but commonly has DRM in it.

Nowadays, printers with refillable tanks instead of cartridges are quite widely available.

Get a laser printer. They're much more reasonable for home use than they were in 1999.

I bought a Brother HL-L2370DW (there's a bunch in the HL-L23xx series, varying slightly in speed and price and availability) about two years ago for I think around $120, which is cheaper than the inkjet my family had in 1999 (not even accounting for inflation). It's about as tall as my hand and it fits nicely on an Expedit. I print about two pages every two months. Since it's a laser, the ink doesn't dry up. It also sits on the wifi and works out of the box with my (non-Linux) devices without any driver setup, so I imagine it will work great with CUPS driverless printing on Linux. The amortized cost of printing (drum/toner) is about 4 cents a page.

I think there's a bunch of other options in the space of ~$100 small laser printers, and I think there are reasonable color lasers in the ~$300 range (but I've found I need color printing once every few years, and it's cheaper to go to the local FedEx or something than either pay for a color laser or deal with an inkjet and its drying ink).

EDIT: I see a bunch of other comments are recommending Brother specifically! I picked them based on an old Wirecutter review (now at https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-home-printer... I think) because they specifically mentioned reliability for low usage, and I can attest it's been great at that.

I have one of these as well. It works perfectly with AirPrint. I can print documents easily from my iPhone via wifi and have never installed a driver.

Same, and Brother has an Android app that works great for printing and scanning from Android phones. I never connect my printer to a computer anymore.

The only thing I don't like about my Brother HL2170W is that it doesn't have duplex (and that's because I didn't think about it when I bought it).

I put a piece of tape over the window on the toner cartridge like 5 years ago, it's still printing with nice quality.

I’ve only had good experiences with printing on Linux, but admittedly my sample size is one. I have an ancient printer. Windows drivers were nearly impossible to find, and when I did find them they cause windows 10 to blue screen.

In Linux, I plug it in and click print. Scanning works too. Click scan get a picture/pdf.

I’ve had 3 Brother printers on Linux with zero issues. They work immediately with the standard Fedora printer setup.

Removing driver support from CUPS is one of the dumbest ideas I have ever heard of in software development and I’m pretty certain it will result in a fork.

I’m not going to throw my printer away just because another FOSS project has decided to go the GNOME way.

The article describes the plan for this. For printers that don't implement IPP Anywhere natively, an app can present a local IPP Anywhere implementation and bridge that to the printer's native protocol. Abstracting the native protocol support away from the print spooler apparently simplifies a lot of the design and should avoid the current situation where you can end up with tight binding between the CUPS version and the driver version.

And who will maintain this fork? For over a decade CUPS is the work of a single developer. No one is exactly lining up to maintain buggy printer drivers.

Desktop printers will have the same demise as cable tv and landline phones: quality will continue to go down and prices up as providers squeeze any remaining profits out of the business.

Which is why when I was in the market for a new printer I went for a model meant for a medium sized office - a pretty hefty Xerox Versalink.

The toner cartridges last 8-10k pages and if you purchase at least one a year (easy enough to do) they extend your next day onsite parts and labour support contract.

I got an amazing deal on it as well - but not the typical $80 "make a loss on the printer and make it back on ink" that consumer models adhere to.

And what, exactly, is replacing them? What else can convert a digital document to paper form?

Other than digital forms?

The printer at work, which is free and convenient if you work in an office.

Or the one at the local copy shop, which is 10c a page. I probably spend ~$1/year printing out forms, there aren’t that many left…

Nothing replaced them. The need for paper forms has mostly evaporated.

For the rare cases you need something printed you can use a dedicated print store / office store with printing or the local library. There is no need for the average person to need a printer anymore.

I really understand your view and I remember the times 10 years ago when everything was digital already. Then I moved to Germany.

Here paper is king still, and its usage is going up (compared to the rest of the Europe). You need to deal with some bureaucracy's? Register on their internet site, they'll send you an OTP in mail. You might be able to do some things online, most of the stuff are tight letters sent to your mailbox.

Even better, some offices still require you to use a fax machine. Good luck, if you're 20something and never used one. I'm almost in my 40s and 2019 was the first time in my life I needed a fax, in Germany.

And I highly doubt the usage of paper will go down in anytime soon here...

I feel like these are prompts to advertise Brother network printers. The quality makes me consider buying their sewing machine.

Ah yes I figured I'd fine one like me in here. Seriously though, if you're having issues with your printer throw it away and buy a Brother printer, they just work and they have reasonable prices for replacement ink. They actually created a new type of inkjet printer, the ink tank printer[1] where you buy the ink in bottles and just pour it into printer tanks, it supposedly ends up being even cheaper on ink than laser printing.

[1] https://www.brother-usa.com/what-is-a-tank-printer

Brother did not invent ink tanks. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertank_printers, Epson first introduced supertank printers to the US market, but continuous ink systems with (I assume) external tanks are at least 15 years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Continuous_ink_sy.... As far as I can tell, your linked article doesn't even claim that Brother invented ink tanks, merely that Brother sells them and they are good.

> Desktop printers will have the same demise as cable tv and landline phones: quality will continue to go down and prices up as providers squeeze any remaining profits out of the business.

Landline phone-call quality has always been and continues to be infinitely better than anything people are using today to replace it.

I can't believe that in 2021 people aren't actively revolting over how useless smartphones are at actually doing phone duties.

I guess the voice quality is fine for me. Maybe that's because of whatever "HD Voice" that my carrier claims to have. The reality is, I rarely make phone calls anymore either way. Almost everything is a video call now, whether on Zoom or Google Meet or Facetime or Whatsapp.

Even if I get a "land line", it's just an expensive VOIP line from my ISP.

Landlines are VoIP in most cases now. In Europe most DSL customers' "landlines" are actually plugged into an FXS port which simulates a landline with dialtone to an analog phone but in reality it all goes over IP and SIP.

Even if we assume you've got a real landline, it's most likely that your call will transit over IP anyway at some point unless you're calling your neighbor who's on the same phone exchange.

The reason for the perceived higher quality is most likely because it all goes over stable wired networks and not due to the analog nature of the landline, and so can be replicated with a SIP deskphone, computer or even smartphone as long as your network is stable (most consumer-grade network gear is crap and most Wi-Fi connections often operate in a degraded mode that appears "fine" for browsing but fails for interactive latency-sensitive tasks such as calls).

Can not relate. If you have a good mic, decent internet, and your friends use Discord (or any other app that uses Opus), call quality is infinitely better than landline.

The real difference is the old landline is natively full duplex and the latency is practically nil. Sound quality wasn’t as nice as the codecs available now, but interactive conversations were so much nicer with full duplex and low latency. Impossible to get with a cell phone.

I’ll also add that the iPhone in particular makes me so angry sometimes. I’ll have a phone number plain as friggin day on the screen - in an email or a web page - and there is _no way_ to call it by just tapping it. Oh no, you have to hold down, hope you highlight at the right point, drag to select the number, then switch to the dialer, hunt around for the hidden “paste” location, and then hit dial!!! Omg it frustrates me to no end.

Oh and speaking of frustrating, you can’t beat the catharsis you feel after slamming down the receiver after a particularly frustrating call

I am not sure how will it function for USB printers or multifunction devices. I mean, it's a really nice initiative, but removing printer drives does not look like a realistic plan.

This is something I was concerned about too, but then I learned about the IPP over USB protocol. Implementation here: https://github.com/OpenPrinting/ipp-usb

I discovered IPP by accident/chance because getting the HP driver or PDD file was not easy. And it has been working perfectly for years !

It was the only choice on the CUPS interface for which driver was optional/not needed. I did not use avahi-discoverh though, I typed the printer IP.

The fact that I choose a semi-pro printer, to get laser and reliability, probably helped. It also allows me to scan directly to a network drive so I never had to install a scanner driver.

Lot of bitching about how bad printers are. I’ve had essentially 0 problems in the last decade after switching to Brother lasers.

Do you use their proprietary drivers on Linux? Or do you print over IPP? I can't use the drivers because ARM.

Windows.

The only thing worse than printers - scanners.

Yes, and that's why printer-scanner combos are called multimalfunction devices. Extra demerit points are accorded for scanning to email or CIFS share.

I have a couple of HP printers here, and the HP OfficeJet Pro 8740 is a multifunction device that has been completely trouble free. Scans to a CIFS share, emails stuff, wakes up from sleep on a print request properly. Amazing.

The older HP CP1025NW laser printer in my study is a complete POS though, for some bizarre reason the driver software completely fails to find it on a regular basis and it seems to forget how to print semi regularly as well.

There is now sane-airscan for "driverless" scanning.

https://github.com/alexpevzner/sane-airscan

I haven't touched corporate printing for several years.

But I can't say that 'home' printing was difficult under Linux (Ubuntu/Pop!OS 20.04/21.04), Windows 10 and a couple of Apple devices.

This has been with two Brother printers (one print-only B&W laser, the other a B&W MFD laser) and two HP inkjet MFDs.

In all the cases to get printing working it's been just a case of connecting the printer to the network and then it's appeared on all the devices.

Scanning is more difficult - requiring either use of the web interface or installing extra drivers.

I used to be able to just find my printer in Linux with the dialog, and it magically worked. Same printer on a newer release of Fedora, took several days of tinkering to finally be able to print again wirelessly.

This IPP stuff is broken IMO. I found an lpadmin command somewhere online and was able to mangle it to get my printer to work.

IPP is probably easier for some people if it works. If it doesn't work, it's going to be impossible for most people to figure out for a few years.

Yesterday, my Ubuntu 21.04 computer attempted to print a 14-page PDF over the network on a Xerox Phaser 6360 using some GhostScript driver. Somehow, the whole entire ream of paper was spat out, all covered in PostScript. I'm curious as to why this occurred, and wonder how Canonical's strategy for Ubuntu 21.04 compares with this one Fedora is looking into now.

Linux printing works..but also doesn't. And then you have to fix it.

Now I just put files on a Samba share on my Linux machine and AirPrint from my iPhone :)

This just means the "drivers" run on the printer itself, I wonder when there will be open source printer firmware.

I wonder when we will be able to get sheets of e-ink that we can "print" to. Or books of e-ink sheets.

You can buy mile long sheets of E Ink material today. I think it is only a couple of dollars per meter. But then you'll need to laminate a backplane of some form so your printer can print to it. Various barrier layers so that it will last longer than a few minutes in air. It gets tricky real fast.

If this actually works, it would definitely be a pro of Linux on the Desktop vs. practically anything else.

I'm surprised many people still need to print things in 2021, since screens are ubiquitous.

Driverless cars to driverless printing .. Oh my how far have we fallen.

Neither of which really work that well.

In defense of the latter, printing with drivers doesn't work all that well either.

If we consider the number of traffic accidents, driving with drivers doesn’t work that great as well.

In the IPP Everywhere future, printers simply work

Ah, my sweet naive child. There is no such thing as 'printers simply working', it's just a story that we tell to keep away the nightmares

point to them, they made me believe for a second

AirPrint makes this mostly a reality, really.

Until it doesn't. Printers setup have broke under all of the major OS I'm using, might it be Win10, OS X (either via Air Print or IPP), and Fedora.

Isn't AirPrint just IPP with some extra proprietary metadata and a set of requirements about accepting certain set of PDF features?

Printers are so bad that you can't even trust Epson or Canon to write a good firmware for their printers, let alone drivers.

It's incredible that they get reliably outperformed on their own professional printers by software written by microscopic third parties (like http://www.quadtonerip.com/html/QTRoverview.html), the reduction in bronzing, gloss differential etc. is night and day.

Scanning too, get a multifunction printer that uploads PDF straight to dropbox and you'll never, ever pull your hair out trying to scan and sign a document ever again. Printers and scanners are a class of tools that are best served _not_ connected to computers anymore. They should be like your refrigerator, just living on their own and doing one thing very well.

I don’t know how it actually works but MacOS has driverless network scanning as well, the scanner announces itself on the network and applications like Preview can use a standard dialog to acquire images.

Of course if there is just one party who tells you what to do it’s not that hard. The manufacturer just has to swallow their pride and do it.

Sure, until you print something more complex than a simple word doc and you end up with a page covered 100% in black toner. Or you have the nerve to print a week calendar out of Microsoft outlook on your Mac and the printer simply spits out a postscript error.

(Lexmark color laser printer using AirPrint on macOS and iOS; installing Lexmark’s drivers fixes the problem)

So in other words, it works until… well it doesn’t

AirPrint just prints PDFs the applications create. It’s hardly their fault Microsoft can’t get that to work.

It’s not Microsoft’s fault - the pdf is well formed. The printer is the problem in this case.

Last week I had to connect my printer locally to make use of a PostScript driver because certain elements of my PDFs were malformed over AirPrint.

I'm partial to using a raspi as a print server. I don't think I restarted it once over a five or six year period, and it doubled as a controller for my UPSes.

Why not adopt a solution that’s already there and works well, namely AirPrint?

That is what's being proposed. From the "driverless" man page https://manpages.debian.org/buster/cups-filters-core-drivers... :

> driverless generates PPD files for printers which are designed for driverless printing (currently IPP Everywhere and AirPrint printers)

AirPrint is just IPP with some extentions. They are going with IPP. Note Linux and Macs use CUPS for printing with CUPS lead Dev is a former apple employee. Most likely the guys involved here were involved in making AirPrint so they may know it's limitations too.

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