Printing on Linux

That's not been my experience.
Granted, printers suuuuuck. But I was legit surprised when both the printing and scanning functions in Linux were hands down better than windows.
- SAME. Everything prints faster and worked well from day one.
  
  SANE? :D
- Same! I'm not at my computer at the moment so I can't check the name of the scanning app i use but yeah, works perfectly. I use a Brother printer as well which I also can't remember the model name of.

Is printing cumbersome and difficult on Linux? Yes, it can be. Is it better than Windows? Also yes.

Any problem I've ever had printing is almost exclusively a problem with the printer, it's usually yellow or cyan. Doesn't matter the document is black&white.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

It used to back in the day, especially if you tried using shitty windows usb inkjets.
Nowadays basically all printers are network printers (they are, aren't they?) plus we have cups which is the same thing macos uses (so manufacturers actually care).

I’m not sure on this one, but it may depend on the printer. Printing on Linux for me has been the easiest process ever. Windows fights me at every corner, but Linux sees my network printers and they just work out of the box. (I’ve only used Brother printers for the last 20 years)

Printing has basically everywhere been annoying. You need(-ed) specific drivers or even apps to make it work and if you have that set up it still can be annoying. And because most of these drivers/apps don’t support Linux printing relied on reverse engineered drivers. Then CUPS came around which made things better. And when apple adopted CUPS for Mac suddenly everyone wanted to support.
If you are really interested check out this episode of destination Linux where it’s discussed in detail.

I only print docs and pictures. But in my opinion printing on Linux is largely better than Windows. It just works most of the time. And if there is an issue the solution is generally restarting the job.

It was terrible in the 90's. Since CUPS became standard around 2000 it's significantly easier.

IDK, my housemates printer required literally 0 setup to work with my linux VM and I've never had an issue. When I print from windows it's a pain in the butt sometimes.

I think that used to be the case more than it is now. Linux now uses the same printing system (CUPS) as macOS, and macOS printing has to work or Apple's customers would be unsatisfied.

Printing is a bitch no matter the platform and its usually the producers of the printers that fail. Everyone wants to make their own standard or interpret any standard in their own way. Duplex settings? Sometimes easy to find, and sometimes called something else and put in a weird spot of the interface.
Basic printing to usb is fine on Linux. My pi zero hooked to a brother laser has been providing wifi printing for me for the last 5 years. Installed cups and connected the usb and it was rocking
- Yeah printing is very hit or miss regardless of platform.

HP Laser 107w, driverless, over LAN.
I just Ctrl+P from any software and it prints.
It also prints programmatically (for e.g. folk.computer ) thanks to IPP.
I didn't have to "think about printing" since I have that setup so I don't know where you get that sentiment.
- Linux printing is very complex. Before Foomatic came along you got to experience it in all it's glory and setting up a working printing chain was a pain. The Foomatic Wikipedia page has a diagram that will make your head spin.
  
  No doubt, the kernel itself is also quite complex... but my comment here is on the user experience perspective, namely, for me at least "it just works". So I'm not trying to imply it will work for anybody flawlessly nor that it's due to the simplicity of the stack, solely that it works, for me.

I noticed this too. In theprimeagens recent video on cups problem they kept making jokes about printing on Unix. I think I must be lucky or something cause so far every printer I have setup on Linux has been easier then having to download all the bloatware to make them work on windows. But I have only done about 6 printers so far on Linux.
- I also like not getting ads from printer companies

I have a HP printer and printing is never a smooth process. No idea why, but it takes me 5/10 minutes each time
- From my experience I've had to deal with their ~~software~~ adware for which I've had to close pop ups and upsell ads before I could do anything with their printers, so that might be why it takes long to print a simple page
  
  What if they printed 1 ad for 1 page........
  ^{Shutup me stop giving them ideas}
  
  My issue lies elsewhere, it takes me that long to have the printer recognized by the OS, then by CUPS browser, then I send the printing job and... it just stalls, never prints. I then cycle the USB ports and start all over again until it miraculously prints
- I have the exact opposite experience. It always prints and although it only prints about 6 pages per minute, it starts immediately. However, I have an old-ish HP laser printer without the crappy adware.
  My next printer will not be a HP for that reason.
  
  Teach me your ways. I don't have a very new model, I think it's a 4130e or something. Do you use CUPS?

This has been my experience also. My Brother printer/scanner works great with linux.

It is way easier than anything else.
- This was also my recent experience on PopOs!
  
  I just started with PopOS a couple years ago. I'm not a power user. I've got one of those crappy travel printers. I think it's Canon? I forget. It worked just fine for me.

Printing on Linux has been seamless for me so far, unlike windows and macos

The Canon Pixma has always problematic for me with driver issues.
- Interesting, I have no problems with a Pixma TS8350. Printing is working as shitty as it has always been on Windows. I have yet to configure the scanner to be fair.
  
  The Canon driver needs to be installed on Fedora and has never worked out of the box without some tweaking. Canon is not really in the Linux support game.

As long as your printer is supported, it's not difficult. The problem is that if you need advanced options, like artists need usually, the options aren't there.

I had a Samsung colour laser printer, they provided driver for linux, I installed them, everything works, full support for settings etc

Drivers.
- You don't need them these days as everything uses standard protocols
  
  Yes, but back then.

It used to be much, much more difficult than it is today, but your experiences will still vary according to what type of printer you have. The problem is drivers. There are still printers out there that have no working Linux driver (mostly old, non-Postscript-supporting, with no Mac drivers either). Some will work with a generic driver, but some features aren't available. The more annoying case is the one where the manufacturer put out a driver once, many years ago, it doesn't work properly with modern versions of CUPS, and they can't be arsed to revise it.
But most printers these days will do basic one-sided 100%-size prints out of the box, and that's all many people need.

my experience is that through network, it's just flawless. I turned on my printer and sure there it was. (though this feature just became a huge issue recently :P)

Anecdotally Windows is the only platform I've used where printing (and scanning) didn't tend to "just work". The only issue I've had printing under Linux was with a second hand printer my dad got that we couldn't get to print from any computer. (shrug)

I'm hooked on my brother with a wifi print server now. All three major OS in our house, I just make sure the printer stays updated. Not sure how to print photos, though.
- Brother is amazing, only printer I've ever used that was automatically detected by every device including freebsd.

That's not my experience. Bought a new Brother MFC the other day. Hooked it up to the Wifi. All Linux machines in the house can automatically print and scan without any additional setup needed.
- Brother, in particular, has always been fairly well supported via Linux fortunately. Especially great since their laser printers have been the best cost/value for home use for a long time.
- Brother actively works to make sure they have good support. Also their printers use standard protocols with no proprietary BS.

You're printin experience within Linix is going to entirely depend on which printer you have. Some work out of the box immediately others take hours to get working and digging through forums looking for drivers.
- I'd say 70% work out of the box with 10% requiring about 30 min of tinkering to get working. The last 10% is completely impossible

It’s fine now, but getting CUPS installed, configured, and getting proper drivers for your printer used to be incredibly difficult, especially if you were new to Linux and didn’t know how to do any of that stuff.

For basic document printing it's been great but for doing fancy print jobs it's tough on any os depending on the printer and support. My wife makes stickers and notebooks and got a fancy Epson printer and going windows Mac and Linux it was a pain. She finally got it down on her windows machine.
Even the documentation was terrible. It told her for duplex prints she would have to manually move the paper but once she figured it out it was all automatic. Youtube guides were even worse since they said it wasn't even possible on that model

It depends... 3d printing works fine :D

I haven't used a new printer or an inkjet in a number of years now, but using my 18yo HP laserjet is a matter of plugging it in and checking it's status under the main distro settings menu. That was also on par with the windows process iirc.
I do remember 20 years ago when I had to sideload pcmcia wifi drivers, though.
- True, i have 20yo hp inkjet and 17yo epson inkjet, old printers work like a charm on linux and you can refill them with standard medical syringe too

Dunno, I own the cheapest Ink Jet HP sells and setup is much faster on Linux than via their drivers on Windows.
Gnome Scanner also wipes the floor with any scanning application from HP/MSFT
- NAPS2 is good for Windows

thats just cuz printers generally suck

my printer spits out page upon page of random characters and mess when I try to print from my desktop, gave up and use my phone now
- You need to set the correct settings. It takes a few tries but in my experience it isn't that hard
  
  you need to set the correct settings
  thanks for the insightful suggestion wowee

I have a Postscript 3 compatible ipp network color laser printer for about 15 years now and it works without any issues with Linux, way better then it does from Windows. So I never understood way they say that printing is cumbersome with Linux.

Because printing in Linux both works and is supported and not supported and hope that there are drivers and they work.
For example, I have a brother printer and in both arch and Ubuntu/mint the printer worked out of the box. But I was missing features like double sided printing. So I had to download drivers for it.
In arch the drivers were on the AUR, so I was printing is seconds.
In Ubuntu/mint they weren’t in my package manager, so I had to go to brother’s website and hope they had drivers. Brother did and while it took a bit it did work too. No worse than windows.

My brother needed the driver installed in debian on Qubes but has been flawless beyond that. When I was still running arch it just worked out of the box

I use printer with a USB personally. No issues with that but I got an HP printer that is really weird with the network stuff

My migration to Linux Mint coincided with getting a Brother Laser printer (DCP-L3520CDW) and I've had zero issues with text, photos or scanning. I just fired up the Brother and Mint said "oh, you've got a printer, wanna use it?"

It depends on the brand I guess. Some Canon Pixma did immediately worked with my distro, like literally zero setup required. However, it refuses duplexing. It just won't do it. Not driverless and not with gutenprint, although it lists the specific model, not when setting it as the default, not when setting it per job.
Yet it works on Android no problem.

Recently ran into an issue with Endeavour OS where the built in printer program would give errors when trying to add my network ecotank printer.
Tried using cups terminal and it worked the first time, and is still working weeks later.
So some of the GUI printer apps that distros ship with have issues apparently, but I don't know the extent of it.
- I've also had struggles with arch with printing, more so than debian-based distros. EndeavourOS is where i did the most troubleshooting, but its also a problem on my manjaro install (whicj ill move to endeavour... Someday) But learning how to use cups directly was worth it.
  Currently, printing via GUI is like 5ppm and very low dpi so... Not great. But at least I can print for the casual use cases out of the box and could work out a terminal solution if I needed to in the meantime.
  I don't print much so haven't put time into getting things working better for bigger jobs, but printing is definitely going to be a more hit/miss experience with arch. Its looking like better GUI experience for my specific model will require a driver from the AUR or scripting the Debian install from brothers drivers site. But my model is apparently not as widely used and just hasn't gotten as much community support I guess

when you buy a printer, just look that it says it's for linux, just like you would for windows or osx. people just sometimes run into problems when they retrofit printers for other OSes to work with linux. there's a good chance a windows printer can work with linux, but it's not guaranteed, so do it only, if you got one for free or it originally had been bought for another PC.

My Xerox works way better than on osx.

apt purge cups-* libcups* libppd*
Thank me later.
- Just uninstall cups-browsed, how are you going to print w/o CUPS?
  
  You can't print anymore. Try to use a plotter.
- See also: https://thehackernews.com/2024/09/critical-linux-cups-printing-system.html
  
  Yeah, this news cycle may not be the best for CUPS advocacy 😄

An u until live CD will find my decade old HP laser and print to it without any work.
Getting my NIXOS to print at the same printer? About an hour.
- Anything on Nix takes a long time
  
  I did have a weird issue with my printer under nix, turns out it was a bug. I guess 1h time investment is about right.
  But that also meant that my Laptop and my GF's PC were a 0 seconds time investment.
  I think that's neat :D
  
  I kind of like that aspect of it... Is that wrong?

I've never bien able to get printing to work on arch, void or nixos.
For some reason though debian, fedora, open s'use ans their derivatives have been easier than on windows

Are you old enough to remember Winmodems and NDISWrapper? There used to be some hardware that was so cheap that the Windows driver needed to do some of the basic work. They were never compatible with anything but Windows (and maybe 98 or XP at that). I’m sure there were some printers like that.
Combined with poor driver support early on, and a lack of standards (at least on the consumer end), and the need to have a separate PPD file for every make and model of printer, and printing used to be a mess. (It almost got bad again when Microsoft tried pushing their XPS format as a replacement for PostScript, PCL, PDF, and EPS, but that didn’t catch on.)
Apple buying CUPS (and hiring its lead developer) was great for the community. They got it working all but perfectly. I’ve never had a problem printing on Linux; HP, Brother, or otherwise.
FYI: the developer quit Apple and forked his project into OpenCUPS, but I haven’t tried that.

If you have a hp printer they got a official software for it

Funny thing is, I don't own a printer, so when I need documents printed I go to the local library. Their computers run Linux, and of all the times I've gone to get a print done it's been an extremely flawless experience. No fuss, no hassle, just load up the document and print it.