Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

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2021-06-18 01:30:04

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By Jonathan Corbet June 4, 2021 Back in a distant time — longer ago than he cares to admit — your editor managed a system-administration group. At that time, most of the day-to-day pain reliably came from two types of devices: modems and printers. Modems are more plentiful than ever now, but they have disappeared into interface controllers and (usually) manage to behave themselves. Printers, instead, are still entirely capable of creating problems and forcing a reconsideration of one's life choices. Behind the scenes, though, the situation has been getting better but, as a recent conversation within the Fedora project made clear, taking advantage of those improvements will require some changes and a bit of a leap of faith.

Traditionally, getting a printer working on Linux has involved, among other things, locating and installing the appropriate printer drivers and PostScript printer definition (PPD) files to allow the system to communicate with the printer using whatever special dialect it favors. Often that involves installing a separate package like hplip, often supplied by the printer vendor. Some vendors have traditionally supported Linux better than others, but none of their products seem to work as smoothly as one would like. While printer setup on Linux has definitely improved over the years, it still easy to dread having to make a new printer work.