> and they suck on Linux.

I have to say I can't remember the last time I worried about a printer on Linux. My current one, a network-attached HP, just popped up when I wanted to print something. I never installed it - it was just there.

Not sure how that would qualify as sucking.

Like most of us on HN, our use cases are not even remotely similar to the majority of users out there who end up using junky, inexpensive USB Ink Jet printers bought at retail outlets like BestBuy or Walmart, which use proprietary bloatware to up-sell them subscriptions to ink replacement and photo printing services. At best, you might be able to find a very basic driver on Linux that speaks compatible Postscript in order to print b&w PDFs.

Or they're in a corporate environment with a much more "enterprise" printer. And again, the IT staff will want to image the same proprietary printer software that hooks into Active Directory on all the clients.

Maybe a small percentage of Linux-savvy admins out there would be able to figure out the correct set of drivers and packages to install that would allow a standard RHEL or Ubuntu laptop to print and scan basic PDFs, but unless the company has a lot of users all using the same Linux distro and version, good luck as it will be a game of whack-a-mole to keep separate distros working every time there's a Kernel upgrade.

I'm a single user on a Mac using a well-researched and highly rated Dell Laser printer. It does work on Linux (and Mac) and has great Postscript support, even over the network.

But 50% of my use is to scan PDFs with optical recognition (I believe that allows the PDFs to be text-searchable instead of just scanning a pixel-image of the documents). And I doubt that function works on Linux, as it requires proprietary Dell software to do the enhanced OCR scanning vs just image scan.

These junk printers usually must support mac os. It is becoming increasingly cheaper for vendor to support standards that work everywhere, including linux.

Printers which simply do not work are very rare nowadays. Sometimes you still have to google for a package or another to install and things instantly work.

I've seen a cheap epson network printer which advertises no linux support to work beautifully after "apt get install printer-driver-escpr". Its scanner function never needed any special setting.

Mine is as far from the top-end of the spectrum as it was available on the store. We got it soon after we moved to Ireland and we needed to scan and print some stuff for government forms. Literally the cheapest printer we could get had wifi network support.

The scanner part is flaky on Linux, but works flawlessly on a Mac.

It doesn't even show up on the Windows box. I won't bother to fix it.

> junky, inexpensive USB Ink Jet printers bought at retail outlets

So the problem is not in Linux, is it?

You must have never done desktop support. It doesn't matter who or what is really at fault, the Normal User Chain Of Responsibility starts with the person who set it up if there is one, then "the computer." If something breaks on Linux, it's the fault of whoever told/helped them to switch.

It's nice to think it doesn't matter, but the competition is the OS everyone writes a driver for and has a support line to fix when it breaks. The problem isn't Linux in a triage sense, but it is in the end user placing blame sense.

The problem is the printer. Q.E.D.

I use to be of the opinion that business/enterprise grade network printers were the way to go. You'd assign an IP and forget about it, when you set them up you'd plug in the IP and magic.

However once you introduce power saving, wifi, and self discovery via Bonjour or whatever voodoo Windows uses, they're not much better.

It doesn't help that every printer manufacturer these days wants their driver to be a full blown App with a custom UI and taskbar icon so they can push their consumables on you.

Hehe, as a former Windows admin, I came to hate printers passionately. My experience with printers on Linux and macOS was a lot better.

However, I do not do much printing in my personal life, so that does not necessarily say a lot.

I used to think that. But I bought a wireless Canon Pixma nearly a decade ago, and haven't had any issues with it yet on any of my Windows machines. Just get on my network and print to your heart's content. No fuss.

Now... previously, I've had printers with multiple hundred megabyte driver downloads... that stopped working when a new version of Windows came out, and they ended up in a landfill. Ugh. But over the past decade, printing doesn't seem to require drivers. It just works.