Oh God, this brought back a traumatic memory. I was hanging out after hours at our office to look after a meetup group that was using our space that night. Nothing tricky, make sure people can get in, keep the lights on, make sure nobody sets the place on fire.
I was plugging away on my personal laptop which had Linux on it. Having a great time doing something or other when one of the meetup organisers approached me with a USB stick and asked if I could help them print out some signs to help people know where to go.
My install was rock solid, fast and set up exactly the way I wanted, but in that moment none of that mattered because it was me who froze. I thought back to all the decisions that lead me to that situation, even the conversation with a coworker a few months ago about Linux who literally said “I love Linux but one day I’m just afraid I’ll have to print something or whatever and I won’t be able to”. How foolish I was to dismiss the wisdom in his words that day, and now my worst nightmare had come to pass.
I swallowed hard, looked the organiser in the eyes, and told them I couldn’t help them. I didn’t even try. Best to rip the band-aid off, disappoint them now and get it over with. After the glaring admission left my mouth I waited for the inevitable response. I was a fraud, nothing more than a self proclaimed computer geek who couldn’t accomplish a rudimentary task despite all my time studying and tinkering. It was over, I guess it wasn’t imposter syndrome after all, I really was an imposter and now I’d been discovered.
But instead the the organiser just smiled and said “that’s totally ok, we were just a bit disorganised and didn’t print it before coming this time. Thanks for your help anyway!” And everything was fine. This time.
If it makes you feel any better I’m 99% sure I’d have done the same thing.
Now that brother, is storytelling.
Hand written signs ftw
I’m new to Linux and was struggling to print from LibreOffice the other day because my printer suddenly wasn’t listed.
Hi, yeah, the printer wasn’t plugged into the computer.
see, this is why you linux cultists just cannot sway people, you’re all pushing this insane operating system that can’t even print to a printer that’s powered off in a block of concrete launched to orbit a distant star and be a russel’s teapot to drive any aliens sending probes out mad.
They are working on a pipewire plugin for that
uh huh. i bet you need to open powershull to do that though, dont you? or does linux not even HAVE powershall?
I know you’re joking, but powershell is actually available on linux lmao
satire is dead.
It’s supposed to be in Kernel 7.0
Printing works out of the box most of the time on Linux. However, if it doesn’t work it really doesn’t work
That’s the problem, then. They keep checking their printer for the printed pages, when they’re really coming out of the box.
printing is bad regardless of OS. Learn to draw and type very well and you will never need a printer, also curse everyone that forces you to use printers they should be shunned from society. We will have full digitalisation by bullying if necessary
I’m convinced they’ll never figure out a practical solution to take technical drawings out to construction sites digitally (battery life, limited screen size, dirt, hazardous atmospheres, the unwillingness of my boss to pay for expensive specialized hardware …). Other than that I’m with you.
just don’t use technical drawings buildings were meant to be built not drawn, simple as.
Printers are bad under Windows because Windows supports nothing out of the box
sudo pacman -Syu --needed cups system-config-printer avahi nss-mdns foomatic-{db,db-{engine, nonfree}}sudo systemctl enable --now cups.socket avahi-daemon.serviceRebooting after helps if it doesn’t find the printer right away.
Odd how this is the opposite of my experience. My mother is unable to print or scan things 2/3 of the time on her HP printer using windows 10. You know, the OS whose parent company has very close relations with HP, and is updated in a manner that forces their users to use the most up-to-date official HP drivers, even going as far as to prevent them from using any other drivers, including the default windows ones.
Meanwhile, my Linux laptop can operate the printer just fine. Never had an issue. I can even operate the loading tray, despite the HP tech support reps telling my mother it is broken.
My HP printer has a special mode where it pretends to be a CD-ROM drive with the driver files on it. One time it entered this mode and I had to use a Windows machine to kick it back into normal printer mode. Couldn’t find any Linux way to do this.
The rest of printing from Linux has been smoother than Windows though. I have a Linux machine run CUPS and that makes printing from Windows easy.
Brother printers are your best bet. And maybe try sudo.
Agreed, heard this many times. Finally pulled trigger and brought one this year.
Print from linux? Print from android? Print from Mac? Print from windows?
Yes! Mother fucking yes! All out of box and easy to install.
Half my family just email whatever they want printing to my Dad and he prints it at his workplace.
We’ve owned multiple printers over the years but 8/10 no matter what device you used, The printer just didn’t work. The “Dad strategy” has never failed.
First day at work for junior software engineer, he is super excited and stays late getting familiar with the project.
Finally he gets up to leave and in the hallway he runs into the CEO himself, looking lost, standing with a piece of paper in his hand in front of a shredder.
“Oh, thank God,” says the CEO, “I thought everybody has left. Look, my secretary has gone and I only have two minutes until I have to be back in the conference call. Do you know how to work this thing?”
The junior looks at the shredder, notices it’s not plugged in, connects it, the thing turns on and he shows the CEO how to put in the paper and press the button. They watch the paper as it starts going in with a sigh of relief.
“Thank you so much,” says the CEO, “you’re a life-saver. I only need one copy.”
I’m on your dad’s role but for my family. It is pretty annoying specially when they can’t explain properly what they want so you have to do guesswork. Anyway it nice when people trust you so long the do not take you for granted.
Rarely used inkjet? If so, your ink dries before you can use it, I’ve had it happen after like 3 pages and then letting it sit, dry next time I try. Laser printers don’t do this, the toner will sit for a long time, and it seems to last longer in general.
If it isn’t that, but the brand is HP, the problem is that your printer should never have been born and should be thrown back into the fires from whence it came. Terrible, terrible printers.
The one kept at home until recently was some early 2000s white(yellowing) and blue thing, might have been Laser.
We had an Inkjet sometime around 2014 and went back to using the old one because it worked more of the time.
does he have a hp printer?
printers are annoying
🤨for what exactly is a printer needed in 2024?
When I can’t wrap my head around a technical document or journal article, I print it. My brain craves paper. I’m a software engineer, so believe me that I would be live inside the computer if I could.
😮 I definitely read better on my smartphone than on big paper, I always get lost if the medium is too large…
Maybe that’s just my age🤔
I’ve heard cybersec guys say they print off things like recovery codes and keep the physical copy stored. Also, entire governments still run on pen and paper (shitty inefficient governments).
" And every citizen that’s living in this city Is a digit on the charts we’re climbing Political systems are too inefficient They split like the atom and burned in the fission Now every department and every decision Defer to the herds of our corporate divisions " shitty inefficient governments are probably better than otherwise
I like this quote. Where is it from?
The Stupendium - The Data Stream
Fair, but a string I can still write by hand😂
Hard copies. You should always keep hardcopies of your most important documents, financial records and certifications. Especially when users can be locked out of a cloud storage these days because an AI decided to flag their account.
😁i have my own cloud
Same. But I still keep critical paper work in a fireproof safe, just in case.
Jesus invented thumbdrives and HDDs SSDs etc for this very reason, the cloud is just my offsite back up of that… having been kicked off “the cloud” by MS some years ago, fcuk those guys.
I recently learned that SSDs do not reliably store data for long amounts of time when unpowered.
Fax.
Fax?
Lmao, so what’s the story behind this? I’m on Tumbleweed and the joke here is that the default security/firewall settings are what make printing difficult. Not sure myself—havent had to print anything yet.
What makes it difficult on Arch?
My guess is that it doesn’t do much that you don’t specifically tell it to, so you have to manually configure printing at some point.
The ONE printer that I have, and arch doesn’t have a driver for it, WHY?!?
because printers are the most proprietary fedjacked snitchware that has ever existed.
open source DIY paper printers need to be a thing.
edit: this seems pretty popular, anybody interested in crowdfunding some mechanical engineering?
@primrosepathspeedrun I tried to convince Pine64 people to do printer next, they politely turned my down since this is almost impossible due all licensing
ps: but probably DIY crowd could ignore this
@lemmy.world @hacktheegg
Artificial, licensing? What kind of licensing could one possibly need to build a machine that deposits ink onto paper? Printers have existed for way more than 20 years so surely all the important patents must have expired.
@grishka @ABasilPlant @AncientGood I made a very little (re)search and found what all main components: #postscript , Printer Command Language ( #PCL ) and a bunch of ISO standards not a subject of licensing. I dunno, maybe this anti #privacy shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots — should be licensed 🤷♂️
I would throw 500$ at a mechanical engineer who was willing to take a crack at this with simple/stock parts. anyone else?
Definitely, Unfortunately tho, the only thing currently standardised about printers is the paper
The main thing base Arch doesn’t install is a bootloader and graphical environment. I think most of the time installing a DE also installs the various tools that may be missing from a fresh Arch install.
In any case, I’ve never had trouble printing on Arch or Arch derivatives. Try following the Arch wiki article on CUPS. So long as you install CUPS I really don’t see what printer problems could be attributed to Arch rather than problems with your printer and CUPS on Linux
To be fair, printers are designed from black magic and require regular blood sacrifices. And that’s with mainstream support, which arch is not.
