cups is great and easy to configure

Posted Feb 29, 2004 21:19 UTC (Sun) by dve (guest, #15903)
In reply to: cups is great and easy to configure by ice
Parent article: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

I must agree. Compared with - say - Microsoft's own obscure, unreliable, mendacious and misleading printing subsystem, CUPS is more like a breath of fresh air. Sure, my end-users couldn't add or remove printers under CUPS. But then, they couldn't manage it under Windows either.

At least CUPS provides a straightforward interface that leaves you in no doubt as to what is wrong, when it goes wrong (ESR and I must not be using the same thing) _assuming_ you understand printers and what ails them.

ESR? My only real objection is a fundamental premise of your article: You have assumed that Aunt Tillie knows far more than most computer users do. I'm not sure who _your_ Aunt Tillie is ('Aunt Tillie could handle this just fine.') but I can line up a dozen users from our corporation who have been using computers, and indeed printers, every work-day, all-day for more than eight years who still do not know the difference between a monitor and a mouse, or a laser-printer and a dot-matrix. Many more are still not quite aware that things have to be plugged into other things (power, networks, serial and printer ports) in order to work at all, let alone communicate with other devices.

The most IT-savvy person at my company (aside from myself) plugged an ethernet cable into a PHONE socket, KNOWING that it was a phone-socket, and expected it to work, and was confused when it did not.

And that's about normal. I've worked for a lot of SME's over the years, and there's nothing unusual about that.

Remember, most of our Aunt Tillies don't even _have_ a computer, because they find Apple and Microsoft products far too confusing to set up or use.