Hacker News Reader

Comment by tcmart14 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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 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/

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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com