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Help for OpenPrinting needed

Till Kamppeter, co-founder and lead of the OpenPrinting project, has put out a call for sponsors after being laid off by Canonical:

I want to continue doing OpenPrinting for a living, and need a way to do so. I am currently working with the Linux Foundation to make OpenPrinting an [organization] which can receive sponsor funding. So now I am looking for sponsors.

Even greater would be, if independent of this somebody could hire me to continue OpenPrinting...



to post comments

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 9:05 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (49 responses)

Sorry to hear about that. Best of luck to you.

Similar to writing to optical rotating media, printing is falling out of fashion, but doubly so because printer manufacturers make actively hostile products, especially in the consumer space. Long initialization phases, supposed empty cartridges, non-original catridge rejection, terrible OSD (menu layout), useless diagnostic messages, subscriptions-and-such, you name it.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 9:42 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (10 responses)

Another reason : professional printing service are very cheap nowadays even including shipping.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 12:00 UTC (Tue) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] (6 responses)

Also modern libraries tend to have great printers that you can use practically free. Ours even have colour printers, sticker printers/cutters, vinyl printers, 3D printers, laser etching, etc. Those obviously cost a bit more to use, but not much.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 14:06 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (5 responses)

> Also modern libraries tend to have great printers

So... how do these libraries print their patrons' documents? How do these "professional services" interact with their printers?

Should we (once again) cede the capability of printing to proprietary platforms?

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 15:36 UTC (Tue) by ianmcc (subscriber, #88379) [Link]

I have no idea how the back-end systems work, but in Taiwan you can print documents at a 7-11 via email your documents to a special address, or upload them to a website, and it will respond with a QR code. Scan that QR code into the machine at any 7-11 store in Taiwan and print your documents. Or you can use a USB stick, but that is a pain compared with just uploading them. Since practically everyone here lives within a few feet of a 7-11 store it is basically impossible to justify buying a printer for personal use.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 18:18 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (3 responses)

Your question is legitimate, however each time I have bought the kind of big printers/copiers libraries have, it came with full Linux support even when the sale representative did not know what Linux was.
You get what you pay for, I guess.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 9:27 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

You get what you pay for, I guess.

Big expensive printers tend to be based around IPP and Ethernet, and you can feed them PostScript or PDF data to print directly without having to convert everything to pixels yourself first. Linux supports that pretty well. It's the el-cheapo proprietary stuff that can become annoying.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 13:43 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

FWIW, Mopria is aiming to make the el-cheapo printers behave a lot like the big expensive ones, by providing a spec that (coincidentally for legal purposes) is a subset of Apple Airprint and Apple Airscan, thus being able to promise that if you follow the Mopria spec, your printer will work out of the box on any recent Windows, Android, Apple or ChromeOS device without the need for the user to install software, but with support for your branding and your special features.

Combine this with Microsoft making installing new printer drivers harder, and the need for OpenPrinting declines - instead of needing support for proprietary formats over proprietary protocols over TCP or USB, you need support for Mopria PDF subset over Mopria IPP subset over TCP or USB.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 14:25 UTC (Wed) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

FWIW, this seems to be the direction CUPS is going as well with CUPS 3.0. Well, it's called "IPP Everywhere", which AFAIU is more or less the same thing as Mopria. Everything not IPP Everywhere is legacy support handled by "printer applications", which take care of format conversions and whatever wire protocol is needed.

See
https://mail.pwg.org/pub/pwg/liaison/openprinting/present...

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 7:18 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (2 responses)

Printing somewhere else isn't often a solution. I print rarely, but when I need it, i really need it, and don't have time to look for a shop or a library, which might not even be open at the time.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 31, 2025 5:54 UTC (Thu) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link] (1 responses)

Indeed. Making a print job that should last 40s take 1h because you need to go collect it somewhere is really no progress. But I guess that the "personal" of "personal computer" is really fading away.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 31, 2025 7:22 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

I personally gave up on fixing my printer (hardware issue, not software) when I realized I had used it less than once a year in the last ten years since I got it.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 14:02 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> but doubly so because printer manufacturers make actively hostile products,

Actively crappy products doesn't negate the underlying _need_ though.

I agree that the need has lessened in relative terms, but the _capability_ of printing is still utterly necessary infrastructure.

I'm honestly surprised Canonical didn't pull the plug sooner; not because Till hasn't been doing amazing work, but rather that OpenPrinting probably never resulted in any additional revenue coming in.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 14:29 UTC (Tue) by fmyhr (subscriber, #14803) [Link] (22 responses)

Regarding hostile printer hardware... last time I looked Brother was still decent. Unsure if that's still the case...?

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 14:45 UTC (Tue) by jorgegv (subscriber, #60484) [Link] (18 responses)

I can confirm It still IS decent. My third laser brother printer, duplex printing, cheap tóner cartridges, no problem at all with bootleg cartridges, PostScript printing, Network connection... for $100. Oh, and great Linux support, of course.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 14:47 UTC (Tue) by jorgegv (subscriber, #60484) [Link] (4 responses)

Forgot to note my model: Brother HL-L2400DW

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 15:05 UTC (Tue) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (3 responses)

I recall reading somewhere that Brother has now finally caved in and started down the path of DRMed toner cartridges.

No personal experience though. Getting a Brother has been my plan for whenever I need a new printer, but my hand-me-down HP stubbornly refuses to die.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 16:09 UTC (Tue) by paradoxmo (guest, #101515) [Link]

Yes, they have a chip in the toner cartridge. They also region lock the cartridges and printers with different physically incompatible keyed notches, even though they have the exact same toner in them, to keep people from shipping the cartridges from region to region for arbitrage.

I recently ran into this when I took a printer with me overseas and found I couldn’t buy the correct EU cartridges anymore in Asia. I ended up having to dremel the correct notch and pull the chip from the old cartridge to put it in the new one.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 17:59 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> I recall reading somewhere that Brother has now finally caved in and started down the path of DRMed toner cartridges.

That was a scare based on a Reddit post. A user had a problem with the printer and Brother's support asked to use the first-party cartridge. That's it.

I have just bought a new Brother printer for our office, and I can confirm that third-party cartridges work fine.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 18:05 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Ars Technica coverage of the incident: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/brother-denies-us...

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 19:05 UTC (Tue) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790) [Link] (12 responses)

And Brother printers also pretty much universally use generic IPP protocol so they require the least software of almost any printer on the market to print to. There's even lots of libraries to print directly for Python, Node, etc, no CUPS even needed the protocol is pure HTTP/HTTPs RESTful if a bit cumbersome at times.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 29, 2025 21:08 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (guest, #33263) [Link] (11 responses)

>use generic IPP protocol so they require the least software of almost any printer

IPP is just transport/framing and not a magic bullet. Your printer still needs a certain format, so you need software almost all the time.
The least-software scenario is a print queue which forwards print jobs to another host without any conversion whatsoever.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 6:20 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Like TCP/9100? Which I made much use of many moons ago ...

Cheers,
Wol

OpenPrinting need is declining (thanks, Mopria)

Posted Jul 30, 2025 8:33 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (9 responses)

New Brother printers are Mopria certified, which (for printing) is IPP with a specific format for document data, and a standard set of attributes so that the OS can determine the possible values of the free parameters in the format (paper size, feed trays, single sided, duplex long side, duplex short side, resolution, colour support etc).

As a result, the need for OpenPrinting is declining; many modern printers are simply "Mopria" printers from the OS point of view, because that gets you "free" driver support for Android, macOS, iPadOS and Windows.

OpenPrinting need is declining (thanks, Mopria)

Posted Jul 30, 2025 11:28 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (8 responses)

> As a result, the need for OpenPrinting is declining; many modern printers are simply "Mopria" printers from the OS point of view, because that gets you "free" driver support for Android, macOS, iPadOS and Windows.

OpenPrinting isn't just about *drivers*; it is nearly single-handedly responsible for the IPP-based client infrastructure used to print from Linux, and that work is far from complete.

Additionally, Till is often the only non-proprietary-product-backed participant in printing standards bodies too.

OpenPrinting need is declining (thanks, Mopria)

Posted Jul 30, 2025 13:42 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (7 responses)

Sure, which is why I didn't say it's going away completely - just that the need for it is declining, because we're reducing down to "printing is PDF over IPP over either TCP or USB", instead of "printing is proprietary format over proprietary protocol over TCP or USB".

I do hope Till finds a new employer willing to pay so that Linux has great printing support - but that doesn't change the fact that OpenPrinting is less needed than it used to be.

OpenPrinting need is declining (thanks, Mopria)

Posted Jul 30, 2025 17:38 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (6 responses)

> Sure, which is why I didn't say it's going away completely - just that the need for it is declining, because we're reducing down to "printing is PDF over IPP over either TCP or USB", instead of "printing is proprietary format over proprietary protocol over TCP or USB".

Unless of course you actually want to use a feature of the printer that's not (or badly) exposed via IPP, or your operating system's (or application's) IPP client doesn't support anything but basic option selection.

Conveniently, printer manufacturers all have their own proprietary, strings-attached apps for that, and heavily push for their use over using standard IPP/Airprint/Mopria clients.

OpenPrinting need is declining (thanks, Mopria)

Posted Jul 30, 2025 17:53 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (5 responses)

That's where Mopria certification (and Apple Airprint) comes in - you cannot be Mopria certified if, for any feature Mopria has support for, you don't expose it fully over the standard mechanism. Do a bad job, and you're not certified.

And the cheap printers don't have features that aren't supported by Mopria, while the expensive ones tend to get it right because someone dropping $1,000 on a printer wants it to Just Work, dammit, and has the budget to match.

This does mean the printer manufacturer apps are doing a lot less than they used to - for the Mopria certified printer I have, all the HP app does is change the defaults. It's not in the printing path at all, and everything it changes is exposed properly over IPP (and changeable from Linux as a result).

Still leaves us needing OpenPrinting to keep the IPP side working well, but it reduces the need precisely because it's now PDF over IPP over TCP, not HP format over HP queueing protocol over TCP.

OpenPrinting need is declining (thanks, Mopria)

Posted Jul 30, 2025 18:16 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

> you cannot be Mopria certified if, for any feature Mopria has support for, you don't expose it fully over the standard mechanism. Do a bad job, and you're not certified.

I own a couple of Mopria-certified devices that were Mopria-certified at launch yet out-of-the box didn't work with the official Mopria and standard IPP clients (ie anything other than than AirPrint-from-iOS).

(These blatant IPP compliance bugs were fixed in a subsequent firmware update, after which they _did_ work with the Mopria client...)

> This does mean the printer manufacturer apps are doing a lot less than they used

> Still leaves us needing OpenPrinting to keep the IPP side working well, but it reduces the need precisely because it's now PDF over IPP over TCP, not HP format over HP queueing protocol over TCP.

It's PDF-over-IPP as long as what you need is supported by the IPP path; otherwise you still need a "real" driver that speaks proprietary-over-IPP/USB.

(I'm not just talking out of my posterior here; drivers I have written still underpin numerous commercial IPP print servers)

OpenPrinting need is declining (thanks, Mopria)

Posted Jul 30, 2025 18:30 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (3 responses)

For a lot of people, the IPP path supports everything they could possibly want, though. Why would I care about the proprietary format, or the proprietary transport protocol, when PDF over IPP works just fine?

And on the Microsoft side of the fence (which matters to a lot of printer vendors), the drive is towards Mopria as the only option, with printer vendors basically being locked out of providing proprietary formats without jumping through a lot of hoops (because MS have had some nasty security bugs caused by the means they use to let you go from Windows printing to proprietary formats). That's yet more pressure to get Mopria right - otherwise your Windows users can't print, or have to get IT to give them permission to print when they WFH.

OpenPrinting need is declining (thanks, Mopria)

Posted Jul 30, 2025 19:48 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> For a lot of people, the IPP path supports everything they could possibly want, though. Why would I care about the proprietary format, or the proprietary transport protocol, when PDF over IPP works just fine?

My point is that it often doesn't "work just fine", and in those situations, the fallback path is _worse_ than the old status quo.

I have printers on the shelf with critical-to-its-users features that IPP *as a specification* is _still_ incapable of representing "correctly" (On top of the features that are implemented "correctly" but are unusable because Apple refuses to fix bugs in iOS+MacOS)

Sure, IPP-everywhere is great for basic office documents and consumer photo printing. I'd even go so far to say that it represents a net win for 95% of the overall userbase.

But for that remaining 5%... the old status quo is becoming no longer _possible_, effectively pushing those users back to fully proprietary printing environments, because they can't afford to wait for the standards bodies to (1) figure out their use cases, (2) printer/print-servers to implement the new specs, and (3) standard print clients to reliably implement said specs, and (4) all parties to actually care about bug reports.

But none of that is my problem any more. [1]

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/gimp-print/mailman/message/5916...

OpenPrinting need is declining (thanks, Mopria)

Posted Jul 31, 2025 21:45 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

To give an example: I once bought a large copier/printer with automatic stapling capability. This feature was supported on Linux by the ppd file provided for CUPS. But this is more complex than just sending a PDF via IPP.

OpenPrinting need is declining (thanks, Mopria)

Posted Jul 31, 2025 22:37 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> To give an example: I once bought a large copier/printer with automatic stapling capability. This feature was supported on Linux by the ppd file provided for CUPS. But this is more complex than just sending a PDF via IPP.

FWIW, stapling is one of the "finishing" options of IPP, formally standardized at least a decade ago. So yes, it really is as simple as specifying an additional property as part your IPP print job.

That said, I highly suspect there is no way to actually _specify_ that option when printing from standard operating system print clients/dialogs to a "driverless" IPP printer.. (I've seen plenty of stuff that uses IPP as the underlying transport but still uses a "driver" of some sort for the settings UI)

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 31, 2025 6:05 UTC (Thu) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link] (2 responses)

I have an interesting experience with Brother.

At the office we have a Brother printer that is immediately usable by Linux systems, using the "driverless" printing, but I‌ always got bad feelings about that printer, since the print quality was not that good, with thin lines typically too much faded out and documents that, while apparently reasonable in look, gave some "not fully rationalized" impression of having something wrong and requiring more effort to read.

One day, I‌ happened to use it with a "generic" (PCL, I‌ think) printer driver, that also happens to work with it. The difference in quality is immense. There is also a specific "traditional" driver from the printer that can be downloaded from the Brother site, but I have never succeeded in making it work with modern Cups. So, from that moment on, I‌ always install the "generic" "traditional" driver.

I have been told that this is because with driverless printing the job gets rasterized before hand and that the rasterizer may not get sufficient information for doing it properly. Whenever for some reason the rasterization does not match the printed pixels perfectly (i.e. some scaling is involved) the quality is compromised.

I‌ wonder if anyone more experienced than me in driverless knows if this is a general problem or just a bad implementation.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 31, 2025 11:34 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> I‌ wonder if anyone more experienced than me in driverless knows if this is a general problem or just a bad implementation.

It's most likely due to crappy client-side rasterization, assuming the same settings were requested in both cases.

That said, another anecdote -- About three years ago, I purchased a Brother HL-L2370DW. It supports driverless IPP, and JustWorked(tm)... usually. Sometimes, the printer couldn't be found, or print jobs would just... disappear. This happened especially often with my partner's Mac. Naturally, that made it *my* problem to resolve. This printer supports PCL6 via JetDirect, so as an experiment I added a remote JD queue to my existing (and very underpowered) CUPS print server, using Gutenprint to do the PCL wrangling and CUPS providing the driverless IPP frontend. Not only did that arrangement never so much as hiccup, it was consistently_faster_ -- both in time-to-first-page and overall throughput. The subjective print quality seemed effectively identical.

A couple of printer firmware (and MacOS) updates later, and driverless IPP to that Brother printer works considerably more reliably. It's _very_ nice when it works, but when it randomly doesn't... you're completely SoL. (Oh, I should mention that the printer and the CUPS server is connected via ethernet...)

(Also anecdotally, Brother printers are noticeably faster when using PCL as opposed to PostScript. And more reliable too, due to a couple of longstanding "quirks" in their PS emulation..)

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 31, 2025 11:53 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> It's most likely due to crappy client-side rasterization, assuming the same settings were requested in both cases.

Wanted to add something here -- Standards-compliant "IPP-Everywhere" requires that the printer accepts at least one of:

a) PWG-Raster, where the client pre-rasterizes each page and sends over a bitmap
b) JPEG, which is decompressed and processed (eg to produce halftones and/or color channel separation as needed)
c) PDF, which the printer will then process/rasterize as appropriate

Proprietary IPP variants have their own PDLs. Apple's AirPrint has URF ("Universal Raster Format"), and Mopria has "PCLm", which can be thought of as a variant of PDF that is more amenable to streaming)

Lower-end models only accept a raster format, which means the quality is entirely dependent upon the client. You'll need a higher-end printer for it to natively accept PDFs (or PCLm).

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 5:12 UTC (Wed) by Vorpal (guest, #136011) [Link] (13 responses)

It is strange no one is making an open source *printer*. There are plenty of open source / DIY 3D printers so why not a 2D printer too.

My only guess is that it is hard to get hold of the specialised parts needed, in particular the drums (for laser printers) or the ink jet nozzles (for ink jet printers).

One option would be to reverse engineer a traditional cartridge with build in nozzles, and then build the rest of your open printer around it. And someone did this for adding ink jet colouring for 3D printers. But they didn't document their reverse engineering from what I can tell (see https://hackaday.com/2024/12/28/full-color-3d-printing-wi...).

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 7:19 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

DIY with toxic toner dust is probably not much fun either.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 11:51 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> It is strange no one is making an open source *printer*. There are plenty of open source / DIY 3D printers so why not a 2D printer too.

That's because those open/DIY 3D printers are generally considered toys that need a ton of constant hand-holding and tweaking to get decent, consistent results. They're also slow-as-heck, relatively speaking.

Putting that aside, it also makes no economic sense; you'd never be able to meaningfully compete with even the crappiest commercial offerings as they (1) have cost-optimized every penny out of the manufacturing process, and (2) often sell the printer below cost by subsidizing it with legally-enforced proprietary consumables or tie-in services. Additionally, you're also competing against the substantial second-hand market for older higher-end gear.

Third, you still need to secure your own long-term supply of consumables, keeping in mind that 3rd parties can and will undercut you... and it's your reputation, not theirs, that will suffer if the output quality is crap. Oh, and that also goes for the printer itself too; the moment you put your design (and perhaps more importantly, the embedded software) out there for China, Inc to copy, you effectively end your ability to recover the non-trivial design NRE. (I'd SWAG that at as easily a quarter million USD, more for a design that's truly ready for mass production)

Fourth, there are legal requirements for color printers (relating to preventing currency counterfeiting) that may require some degree of non-openness in the printer firmware.

I could go on, but that's just off the top of my head.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 31, 2025 7:26 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

Probably doesn't help that DIY printing would be "okay, now I have built my printer, now let me wait 6-12 months until I have a need to print 3 pages so I can benefit from those many hours of work I put into building it" for most people these days.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 12:28 UTC (Wed) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link]

> There are plenty of open source / DIY 3D printers so why not a 2D printer too.

I assume because it's hard with the resources a typical hobbyist has. However if you're happy with a plotter, there are many of them for instance https://www.brachiograph.art/

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 18:28 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (8 responses)

The precision manufacturing required for inkjet printers is insane. It's far out of reach for casual manufacturing.

Laser printers are even worse. Starting from the word "laser" itself. Few things go better with DIY than instant permanent blindness if you make a single mistake.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 19:08 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Laser printers are even worse. Starting from the word "laser" itself. Few things go better with DIY than instant permanent blindness if you make a single mistake.

Your point about the precision requirements for printer manufacturing are spot-on, but for the past couple of decades, pretty much all (non-industrial-scale) "laser" printers on the market are actually based on an array of LEDs. Far lower power, far safer, and requiring a lot less manufacturing precision.

But even assuming your ultra-high-precision print head (be it movable inkjet or fixed LED array or whatever) is manufactured by a specialized supplier, the rest of the printer still has some pretty high precision assembly/calibration requirements -- eg for 600dpi you need ~0.4mm accuracy in your feed and/or head positioning mechanisms, along with a media path that has to handle a near-infinite variety of "paper" types, weights, and thicknesses and feed all of that reliably in deserts, swamps, and everything in between. And then there's the matter of speed.

At only 3ppm, you have 20s per page, which equates to an average feed speed of ~14mm/s. If your print head has to move (eg on an inkjet) and you have a 6mm head (which at 600dpi has has 144 vertical elements) that takes about 47 passes for a page, which works out to a bit over 5m/s of average sustained speed... reversing direction every 20cm or so.

...and at every 1/600dpi horizontal step, you need to precisely meter out a certain amount of ink from each of those 144 nozzles. Fun times!

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 21:53 UTC (Wed) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link] (6 responses)

> Laser printers are even worse. Starting from the word "laser" itself. Few things go better with DIY than instant permanent blindness if you make a single mistake.

I think the actually hard bit is the *combination* of applying toner evenly and getting it to fall off where you don't want it by shining the laser on it and the fusing it to the paper with heat.

The laser bit, by itself, is done in many projects, for scanning or exposing photo-resist for PCBs. For instance: https://github.com/hzeller/ldgraphy

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 30, 2025 23:00 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

> The laser bit, by itself, is done in many projects, for scanning or exposing photo-resist for PCBs. For instance: https://github.com/hzeller/ldgraphy

My hair started moving after seeing this. 2W is a class 4 laser (anything above 500mW laser is), which is the most serious category. It can cause permanent blindness with a stray reflection, faster than you can blink.

As a former laser safety officer, I would shut down this whole thing in a nanosecond.

The design doesn't have any interlocks, the optical path can allow stray reflections to exit the body. It's not clear if the plastic can absorb the laser wavelength enough. And in any case, I don't see any failsafes in case the mirror actuator fails and the laser burns a hole through the housing.

To even safely work with this during the R&D, you need to follow all the safety rules. This means that your bench must not be higher than waist level, the door to the lab must have interlocks that disable the laser if opened, you have to ALWAYS wear the safety glasses, you can't bend over to pick up anything from the floor unless the laser is locked out, etc.

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 31, 2025 13:14 UTC (Thu) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link] (4 responses)

The video shows a 500mW laser, though. 2W was a planned development, but he hasn't released a video with that.

At least this one is going via photo resist. The really scary ones cut directly with a fiber laser.
(I've only seen xy plotter versions of these)

Printing is declining

Posted Jul 31, 2025 22:06 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

The video shows a 2W laser? Anyway, even 500mW is still Class 4.

Lasers are absolutely unique in their danger to eyesight.

You can't really do yourself a lot of physical harm with a laser. If you accidentally get a 2W laser beam on your skin, it'll be a bad burn/cut. If you're really unlucky, you might get damaged tendons or bad bleeding. It might suck, but it likely won't be life-changing.

But if you get that beam into your eyes? It's instant eye damage. With life-changing consequences and no real treatment options.

So if you want a DIY project, please just avoid lasers. Really. Laser safety rules are written in Braille.

Printing is declining

Posted Aug 1, 2025 10:20 UTC (Fri) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link] (2 responses)

> The video shows a 2W laser?

The text in the video says it shows a 500mW laser, and that he has a 2W to make it faster on *order*.

I am not arguing that this is a good idea, or in any way safe, just that this is a thing that is being done.

But I must say I am actually a bit surprised at how few reported laser injuries there are compared to the number of projects I see. With other dangerous projects, like lichtenberg wood burning, there are several fatalities each year. Not sure if this is inherent or just that the laser people somehow have more respect for the dangers. The majority of the laser injuries I have heard about have been to uninvolved bystanders, e.g. somebody pointing a strong laser at a crowd or something.

Laser dangers

Posted Aug 1, 2025 11:48 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

Part of it is that the most common form of laser injury is eyesight impairment; lasers very rarely kill or leave obvious marks. Someone who notices their eyesight being bad after a laser exposure may well delay getting an eye test, and then attribute their loss of vision to age, instead of injury.

Laser dangers

Posted Aug 1, 2025 13:49 UTC (Fri) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link]

Probably part of the issue, yes.

Terrible Canonical Hiring Practices

Posted Jul 29, 2025 22:06 UTC (Tue) by developer122 (guest, #152928) [Link] (1 responses)

Canonical seems to have pretty rotten management and hiring/retention practices.

It was a year or so ago that I read a story of someone who had made it all the way through their byzantine hiring and interview process, only for the CEO himself to step in at the last moment and demand an extra "interview." That interview turned out to be him demanding why she hadn't graduated from highschool despite a long and distinguished 30+ year carrier since. The offer was rescinded days later.

Terrible Canonical Hiring Practices

Posted Jul 29, 2025 22:17 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

That specific incident didn't involve me, but I had a very similar experience a few years back. Made it all the way through the completely absurd process and then had one final interview lined up with Mark Shuttleworth. In the first 5 minutes, he pretty much said I'd be a "diversity hire" and then became condescending / dismissive and outright hostile.

I'd already 95% decided to accept another job and I knew 5 minutes into that interview I wouldn't be hired by Canonical, so right after the interview I accepted the other job which turned out to be an awesome two years that took me to retirement.

If I were a job-seeker, I would never, ever apply at Canonical. The experience soured me so much I won't use any Canonical products either. No Ubuntu anywhere near my network.

Printing is still needed and still frustrating

Posted Jul 29, 2025 23:27 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

Pretty much every business needs to be able to print papers quickly in case the customer wants a printed copy. Printing also is necessary for shipping. So I would not discount printing yet.

From my experience, printers are still unreliable (especially in Linux, but not just in Linux). Printers disappear from printing dialogs randomly. Jobs get lost or get stuck without explanation. When a printer gets reset and generates a new certificate, the software cannot deal with it. Settings get forgotten. When one needs to print an invoice on one printer and a label on another, the printer needs to be selected every time—it shouldn't take AI to select the right printer and set color output for the invoice and grayscale for the label.

It's been a long time...

Posted Jul 31, 2025 13:05 UTC (Thu) by torstenaf (subscriber, #58477) [Link]

About 25 years ago, Till have me an account on LinuxPrinting.org and I worked on a Perl script to publish information from the forums to the webpages of printer brands and individual models. After uni, my professional career took me many different directions, so it's surprising to see this article and that Till spent all these years in printing. No doubt his skill and knowledge accumulation is extraordinary, and it saddens me that he is in this position. I hope for the best possible outcome.


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