Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 5, 2021 0:29 UTC (Sat) by areilly (subscriber, #87829)
Parent article: Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Notwithstanding that my own ancient Lexmark printer is connected via USB (when it's connected at all), I'm a bit surprised that printer drivers, even in the IPP Everywhere sense are still a thing.

Surely networked printers must all have web-tech front-ends by now, that (a) provide all of the settings that you could want, and (b) allow upload or drag-and-drop of the relevant document fomats (postscript or PDF, probably)? Why is any of that complexity something that you want programs on the host (client) computers to be running?

Top that off with a bit of REST API magic so that you can still have a "print" option in your word-processor I suppose, but I'd be perfectly happy if that all went away, I think. I only print PDFs.

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 5, 2021 1:13 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Why is any of that complexity something that you want programs on the host (client) computers to be running?

The world of printing is vastly more complex than a human interactively uploading PDFs.

> Top that off with a bit of REST API magic so that you can still have a "print" option in your word-processor I suppose

....and thus, IPP was born. :)

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 5, 2021 13:10 UTC (Sat) by dottedmag (subscriber, #18590) [Link]

Well, you have described IPP

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 5, 2021 18:30 UTC (Sat) by kucharsk (subscriber, #115077) [Link] (1 responses)

This all assumes the use of newer printers and that the printers work as expected.

My workhorse is still an Apple LaserWriter 8500, purchased in 1997 and that still works well, and most smaller companies only buy a new printer when they absolutely have to.

I also added an HP Color LaserJet Pro M477fdw in 2016, but printing to it even from Apple platforms is hit and miss (most commonly it will not awaken from sleep, leading CUPS to just pause the print queue with no hints as to why, despite several firmware updates from HP.) Note also that very often its web interface will just stop responding after two or three clicks, requiring you to power cycle the printer.

Printing is still a mess no matter which printer and OS you use.

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 5, 2021 23:32 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Interesting. I have an M477fdw, and it worked flawlessly from Windows 7 and 8.0/8.1. It still works flawlessly from my Windows 10 laptop, but from my wife's it has difficulty remembering that there's a duplex unit installed and as you say it often won't wake from sleep making her Windows take it offline.

It took me a while to work out the fix for the offline problem but I've discovered a simple solution - run the printer troubleshooter. It comes back and says "nothing wrong", but as a side effect it gets the printer back online.

Cheers,
Wol