I’ve noticed a general sentiment that printing on Linux is (or at least was) extremely cumbersome and difficult. Why is that?
I only print docs and pictures. But in my opinion printing on Linux is largely better than Windows. It just works most of the time. And if there is an issue the solution is generally restarting the job.
Printing is a bitch no matter the platform and its usually the producers of the printers that fail. Everyone wants to make their own standard or interpret any standard in their own way. Duplex settings? Sometimes easy to find, and sometimes called something else and put in a weird spot of the interface.
Basic printing to usb is fine on Linux. My pi zero hooked to a brother laser has been providing wifi printing for me for the last 5 years. Installed cups and connected the usb and it was rocking
Is printing cumbersome and difficult on Linux? Yes, it can be. Is it better than Windows? Also yes.
Any problem I’ve ever had printing is almost exclusively a problem with the printer, it’s usually yellow or cyan. Doesn’t matter the document is black&white.
That’s not been my experience.
Granted, printers suuuuuck. But I was legit surprised when both the printing and scanning functions in Linux were hands down better than windows.
Same! I’m not at my computer at the moment so I can’t check the name of the scanning app i use but yeah, works perfectly. I use a Brother printer as well which I also can’t remember the model name of.
SAME. Everything prints faster and worked well from day one.
SANE? :D
Haha, nice.
I’m not sure on this one, but it may depend on the printer. Printing on Linux for me has been the easiest process ever. Windows fights me at every corner, but Linux sees my network printers and they just work out of the box. (I’ve only used Brother printers for the last 20 years)
This has been my experience also. My Brother printer/scanner works great with linux.
Printing has basically everywhere been annoying. You need(-ed) specific drivers or even apps to make it work and if you have that set up it still can be annoying. And because most of these drivers/apps don’t support Linux printing relied on reverse engineered drivers. Then CUPS came around which made things better. And when apple adopted CUPS for Mac suddenly everyone wanted to support.
If you are really interested check out this episode of destination Linux where it’s discussed in detail.
The Canon Pixma has always problematic for me with driver issues.
Interesting, I have no problems with a Pixma TS8350. Printing is working as shitty as it has always been on Windows. I have yet to configure the scanner to be fair.
The Canon driver needs to be installed on Fedora and has never worked out of the box without some tweaking. Canon is not really in the Linux support game.
I had a Samsung colour laser printer, they provided driver for linux, I installed them, everything works, full support for settings etc
For basic document printing it’s been great but for doing fancy print jobs it’s tough on any os depending on the printer and support. My wife makes stickers and notebooks and got a fancy Epson printer and going windows Mac and Linux it was a pain. She finally got it down on her windows machine.
Even the documentation was terrible. It told her for duplex prints she would have to manually move the paper but once she figured it out it was all automatic. Youtube guides were even worse since they said it wasn’t even possible on that model
I have a HP printer and printing is never a smooth process. No idea why, but it takes me 5/10 minutes each time
From my experience I’ve had to deal with their
softwareadware for which I’ve had to close pop ups and upsell ads before I could do anything with their printers, so that might be why it takes long to print a simple pageWhat if they printed 1 ad for 1 page…
^Shutup me stop giving them ideas^
My Xerox works way better than on osx.
when you buy a printer, just look that it says it’s for linux, just like you would for windows or osx. people just sometimes run into problems when they retrofit printers for other OSes to work with linux. there’s a good chance a windows printer can work with linux, but it’s not guaranteed, so do it only, if you got one for free or it originally had been bought for another PC.
