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Comment by lukan | Hacker News Reader

Having giving support with windows and linux - I don't think so.

Recently things got way better with hardware support - but just making a printer work, used to be a unsolvable problem for my dad for example, who has a electro engineering background (but doesn't speak english, and error messages in linux are very seldom localized). In windows he put in the CD that came with the printer and it worked.

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For the longest time, I had far more trouble getting printers to work in Windows (where I had to download a driver and hope that it worked right, and sometimes the only drivers offered were the ones for a different version of Windows than I had) than on Linux (where I just plugged in the USB cable and voila, the printer was autodetected). And I mean over a decade.

Since Windows 7 or so, I have seen the ease of installing a new printer driver in Windows rise to the level that Linux had always been at in my experience (I realize other people's experiences have differed). But it was shocking to me how easy Linux printing was for so long, vs how much I struggled when I had to install a Windows printer driver.

Yeah well, I don't usually print anymore, but just recently I did try to connect a printer that worked flawlessly on windows did not worked on my linux devices out of the box - and then I decided I rather do other things than printer troubleshooting.

As a contra-anecdote, my wife is not very interested in tech and has a Linux laptop for home use and a Windows laptop for work use. For both of them any attempt to use the printer is cursed. I think that's just printers for you :)

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