I’ve noticed a general sentiment that printing on Linux is (or at least was) extremely cumbersome and difficult. Why is that?
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.
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
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?
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’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)
This has been my experience also. My Brother printer/scanner works great with linux.
