CUPS vs Sun vs LPRng

CUPS vs Sun vs LPRng

I agree with your comments about CUPS vs. LPRng. CUPS is very
desktop-centric, and focuses on making life easier for the end user.
I've found it to be a nightmare to manage, though, compared to
something like LPRng, which is focused on the back end.

CUPS does, indeed make it easy for the end user to add printers
without having to know anything about print filters. But how often
do users need to add printers? (Especially in an enterprise
setting.) With LPRng, creating a print queue is straightforward
for the administrator, and the configuration files are understandable
later.

For the end user, LPRng provides the wonderful ability to type:

lpr -P printer@printserver myfile.ps

without having to set up any printers on his/her local machine.

I take the Unixy view that the end user shouldn't need to know
what type of printer he/she's printing to. The print filters on the
print server should take care of this, and all the end user should
need is the printer name. I agree that this raises questions about how
to let the end user tweak the output, but my users have been largely
happy with "-Zsimplex", etc. for a long time.