The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

A lot of people have said, "I use CUPS, it works great!" These people use CUPS to print small files to a local printer. They certainly don't use CUPS in a heavy-duty networked environment.

Ever clicked on the Cancel button? CUPS often gets wedged (especially if it's a big doc or going over the network). Because it never prints any error messages (just helpful web pages like "client-error-forbidden"), it gives you no clue as to what went wrong or how to fix it. *I* submitted the job, why should I be forbidden from cancelling it?? More than once I've purged all traces of CUPS from my system and reinstalled from scratch just to get my printer working again. (Simply clearing the queue and restarting CUPS doesn't do it).

I REFUSE to learn the inner workings of my print spooler. It's stupid that I have to babysit CUPS every few months. I asked about the crappy error messages three years ago, and the reply was that they were stalled on the internationalization and it should be fixed in six months. Ha.

Unfortunately, lprng also requires deep knowledge to set up and use. Printing on other platforms is trivial -- I don't know why Linux insists on making it so hard. For once, I actually agree with ESR.