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Ha! Printers!!

I worked on an OS called CTOS back in the day. It was difficult to set up printing, because there was no feedback. It worked or it didn't, and there were queues to configure and services to install and network connections...

Somebody in a trade rag wrote "Its easy to print on an Apple, difficult on an IBM PC and impossible on CTOS". That smarted.

So a guy named Tom Ball (later the Java Swing guy) wrote a Prolog script that somehow could just tell you if printing was working or not, and what to do about it. Never figured out how he did that. BUt our trouble tickets went from something like 60% printer-related, to noise. Just like that.

I remember after all these years, and try to make software foolproof. For the customer service folk, because they matter.

Early on as a dev, I made the mistake of doing exactly what I was asked. Basically I learned that user control was better than automation in some cases. I had to write a script to select batches of files from a larger number for translation/annotation with certain proportions of various characteristics. There was some amount of self balancing involved, and I wrote a cli program that did this well. I took a process that previously took days (often communication lag) dozens of times per year and brought it down to milliseconds.

The problem was that the humans involved didn't really want what they asked for. They wanted control. They wanted to select a batch with certain characteristics, then another batch with others. They wanted to pass a list of files that must be included, a list that must not. They wanted audit functionality, they wanted multi-step selection, to mark files for auditing, translation, and different annotations types, to select a batch from one annotations type for another.

At the end of the day, this ever evolving script worked out very well and took away the need for a programmer doing complex sql and filesystem queries. There was still a human involved, but that was because the human wanted to be involved. The process taught me about users wanting something other than what they ask for, scope creep, and also showed me the value that could be generated via a fairly simple script created in collaboration with the user.

Printers are plug and play on Windows? That's not my experience. I have constant problems at work. Settings resetting, stupid printer driver GUIs nagging about ink, prints coming out wrong and making me go into the detailed settings to fix it. Rare are the days where I can just print the stuff I need with no fuss. I'm fortunate enough to be able to solve problems on my own. Coworkers are forced to call support and waste hours and hours of their time because of these printers. The scanning situation is even worse.

I do a little tech support for my neighbors after hours. Printer issues (on Windows) are an extremely common complaint. All kinds of random things can and do fail.

I've been working with printers for 35 years and they still find ways to destroy my soul.

This week I discovered my Canon printer has some way to detect "plain [white] paper" and absolutely refuses to print on the high quality "cream" coloured paper instead. No matter what tricks I tried in swapping the paper, as soon as I put the better paper in the tray it would freak out.

Some printers use an infrared sensor to detect paper width. Those tend to freak out on weird paper colors, though I've never had the issue with cream before. Only darkish colors like purple and the like.

Printers are plug-and-play on Windows, macOS, and especially iOS (AirPrint) if 1. you're always printing PDFs at 100% scale, single-sided, black-and-white, and 2. you're printing against a printer where that particular configuration is its wheelhouse (i.e. a laser printer.)

I believe you’re referring to ESR’s essay http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

That's the one!

Yeah it takes a LOT of work to hide it [1]

Also: For some stuff I want to be able to use the "arcane" parameters for some really obscure task where it is just the right flag or something.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HllUoT_WE7Y

> I face this all the time at work. "Can't you just make a single button to run this task so I don't have to figure out how to use this complicated script?"

"Just" is a four-letter word and its use is forbidden. Replace it with "in addition" and change how everyone thinks about the request.

> The difference is that hiding those arcane input parameters takes work,

I'm reminded of the first time I tried to get wifi going from a CLI-only NetBSD install. wpa_supplicant something something.. I eventually got it working but it was sort of a nightmare compared to how you connect wifi in an OS UI.

I have not experience this fool-proof plug and play on windows or mac os. I just last year replaced a printer because it wasn't working with my wife's Macbook Pro, it worked one day and just dropped of the face of the earth the next (was able to print over USB from my linux laptop still). The printers were I work constantly have issues working with the windows PCs.

Moral of the story, printers are a necessary evil and what is wrong with the world.

EDIT: For future readers if you don't see the responses. The home printer was a Brother.

Also, this is not a statement that Linux is better. Think of it as the experience of using printers in general is pretty shitty regardless what your computer is running.

Printers were the bane of my existence when I was responsible for maintaining a small business's computer stuff. They all ran shitty Windows PCs with varying versions. One day one of the accountant's computers started crashing on boot, and after a hell of a long time, I found that some Epson printer driver had set a registry key that didn't revert upon uninstallation, and that crippled the machine.

I wonder if in your case, your old printer relied on either 32-bit kernel extensions (I don't know if that's a thing), or if it relied on one of the deprecated Kernel Programming Interfaces such as IOUSBFamily. I also wonder if a printer driver falls into a category of deprecated extensions that are silently reported by the OS, because most do pop up an alert of some kind.

https://developer.apple.com/support/kernel-extensions/

Was it a HP printer?

HP last year managed to accidentally revoke their macOS code signing certificate. I'm not sure how much software was affected, but as far as I know all HP software for Mac, including printer drivers, was broken (CRLs are updated automatically even if you have automatic software update disabled)

Nah, it was a Brother printer, I replace it with a cheap HP printer. The Wireless on that one stopped working, I've just given up and my wife uses the cable to print. Well luckily the HP is still playing nice over a USB cable.

If you still have the Brother printer, try disabling IPv6 on the Brother printer.

I remember this issue from a while back. Some update happened, and then wireless printing stopped working on some iOS devices. It happened to a colleague's macbook, and disabling IPv6 on the Brother printer fixed it for us. I can't remember where I found the initial advice, but here's someone else mentioning it: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250584298

Any sufficiently large discussion of software complexity will spawn a large sub-thread about printers.

Any sufficiently large discussion of printers will beget a number of ad-hoc support sub-threads.

Printers used to rum much better on Windows back in the day when the manufacturers developed drivers with the intention to make them run well. I've never seen any one doing the just "plug, install driver, run", except for shared printers maintained by a contractor. But they used to run better than Linux.

Nowadays the main advantage of Linux is that it won't install the manufacturer's driver. Anyway, the arcane settings aren't required anymore.

The single most problem-reducing maneuver I've tried with home network printers is getting the printer off plain DHCP and make it consistent (set a static IP manually [outside your DHCP range] or by DHCP reservation).

After sorting this out in the router, then add the printer to the various desktops/laptops/tablets/phones.

Maybe I'm imagining the improvement, but I don't think so (and it can't hurt).

> The difference is that hiding those arcane input parameters takes work, and a lot of it.

One of the things I say often, too often, is, "Making it look easy is very very hard."

When you make one part simpler, you move that complexity to another part.

“All user input is error.” - Elon Musk