Arch users trying to print files

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.
- I would have tried anyway. Sometimes Linux works better with printing than Windows, some times the other way round. It just depends what the printer is and how you have your system setup.
  
  Just say how it is. "I can try but printers are notorious for making simple things difficult."
- Did you bite the bullet and go and print something the next day?
- Now that brother, is storytelling.
- Hand written signs ftw

Weirdly enough I’ve found it much easier to print on linux. It just works out of the box.
If it doesn’t it is definetly the printers manufacturer fault 😅
- It's something we can thank Apple for. CUPS is the standard printing system on practically all non-Windows OSes, and Apple hired its developer and did a lot of work on improving it in the 2000s and 2010s.
- Speaking of hard Windows things being easy on Gnome. The Gnome smb and rdp sharing capabilities work simply turning them on.
  In Windows it's a whole mess trying to force it to refresh the network or wait for that diagnostic loading bar while it resets everything for it to sometimes work.
- Me too. I have a Brother printer. When I first set it up, Windows printed everything in inverse black and white until I hunted down the correct driver. Windows also never figured out how to wake it up, so I always had to manually wake it up. And it simply never worked with the scanner.
  Linux got everything right without me having to fuss with anything.
- My printer can print, but most of the other features are locked behind Brothers drivers. Copying/ scanning from the document feeder and duplex were kind of a pain to get working, and for some reason only work from certain programs.
- Same here, a certain printer of mine just did not work with my Windows install whatsoever but works fine with CUPS lol
- In my house, I have Linux machines that print flawlessly and reliably to our HP laser. My wife has an iMac and I swear I have to install it fresh every time she goes to print. But the absolute best printing experience? Over WiFi from an iPhone. Crazy.
- not on arch, you have to install cups and enable the service or socket.
  
  That's just how Arch works, you have to install everything yourself
- Easier than what, exactly? Windows always works out of the box for shit like printers. If it didn't, 99% of their user base would be calling it defective.
  OSX, on the other hand, is where I've had so, so many issues with printers.
  
  Nah, if you haven't fought windows printer drivers then you've just been lucky. Meanwhile you can almost always convince CUPS to spit out a print.

Many years ago, my aunt bought an old, terribly specced laptop and couldn't get Windows to run on it. I installed Ubuntu and everything was fine - she could check her email and browse toxic conspiracy theories on Facebook and all was good with the world.
Two years later when visiting I got my first support request - would I mind showing her how to print something? No problem, but would you mind showing me what you were trying? She was selecting menu items to send to a virtual printer, not the one on the network. I show her the correct printer to send to and the thing prints. Easy. Out of curiosity, I check the outbox queue for the virtual printer. Over a hundred documents, going back two years.
For two years she'd been unable to print, and every single time she'd ever attempted to print something she'd followed the exact same steps that didn't work, and just accepted that this was the way things were.
SMH.
- Its the same way the Vote with the same outcomes of nothing working but keep voting the same anyway, ya never know, next one might work :)

printers are annoying

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 like all the things on Linux haha.
  One day my display randomly stopped working. That was a fun week of debugging lol
  
  The only Windows reinstall I've had to do in years was when I unplugged my monitor's integrated USB hub and somehow that completely broke Windows recognizing it.
  Linux though? It's typically user error in my case.
- The trick is to give up and just shuttle files from computer to printer via usb stick

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.

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
  
  It's supposed to be in Kernel 7.0

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
- Printers are something they've actually figured out on the last few years.
  I can go somewhere I've never been, get the login for the network, and print documents from my phone without any downloading drivers, sacrificing goats or anything.
  
  you don't know how many drains that sysadmin installed under her altar, do you?
- 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
  
  That's simply not true anymore. Most printers work on windows locally and through a network without any special driver installations these days.
  You can buy a printer, a computer, and a wifi adapter, network them together, and start printing without installing any printer utilities or additional drivers.
  They've come a long way in this area.

Have you also tried using Signal instead of WhatsApp? Sorry, had to do it.
- I do use Signal quite a bit. Some important contacts don't use it and hence, you see my using of WhatsApp.
  
  Strange that an arch user would be so tied to whatsapp

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.

Laughs in Archlinux and Brother printer
- Cries in the same
- Idk how is it with brother printers, but brother scanners are an absolute PITA to make work on Arch
  
  Over the network can be hit or miss but the usb cable and the drivers from the AUR have yet to fail me
  
  I can't even get this Brother to scan to a flash drive in its own USB port. It acts like it's successful; it scans and no errors show up... but the files just aren't there. Tried multiple USB drives and made sure they were formatted to FAT32 in a sector size that Brother recommended in the manual.
  Printing to it from Debian was even easier than expected, though. Plug it in, it shows up as a networked printer, and you print to it.

I just recently went through some linux printer woes. When my toner cartridge got down below 25% documents spooled from my Linux machine would fail with an out of toner error. Files from windows and the diagnostic pages from the printer itself printed just fine. Turned out I had been using a slightly incorrect print driver on my Linux machine this entire time. After a TON of digging I managed to find the correct driver and was able to print again. Only wasted most of a morning figuring it out. Lol!

"Can someone help me figure out how to print a file?"
"Pft, why would you want to?"

Def a skill issue. But seeing as they are using arch I have no doubts that they will get over this and ultimately come out learning more about Linux and computers overall (which is probably their goal seeing as they are using arch)
I've never had issues printing on arch (btw)

sudo pacman -Syu --needed cups system-config-printer avahi nss-mdns foomatic-{db,db-{engine, nonfree}}
sudo systemctl enable --now cups.socket avahi-daemon.service
Edit nss-mdns
Rebooting 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.

There's actually a surprising amount of linux printer drivers that don't come included with CUPS but are available for download from OEM sites. Canon ships an all in one tar.gz that includes PPD files, DEB and RPM install formats, and a lazy script to install it for you along with any dependencies.
- I have tried to install Canon LBP2900B drivers a thousand times. It does not work on any distribution. I have to use a windows VM.

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.

does he have a hp printer?

My personal printer works flawlessly on Linux, except that it cannot be convinced to print double-sided, no matter how deep I dig into the settings. Boils my blood.

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.
- I don't know of anything specifically, just my experience with printers on linux is they either work pretty effortlessly or they're awful and don't seem to work correctly no matter what you do.
  
  I've had some pretty great experience with my Brother multifunction printer / scanner on my Ubuntu server, but never played with Arch.
  Best part about Brother's scanner driver is that it literally just runs a shell script you can modify. I have it set up such that I can scan to PDF from the printer & it will programmatically drop it into my samba share, despite the fact that my printer is not expensive enough to come with the "scan to nas" feature in firmware.

Maintaining a printer is hell on any OS. I learned to not own a printer long ago. That's what places that offer printing services are for. And it's not very expensive typically

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?
  
  Definitely, Unfortunately tho, the only thing currently standardised about printers is the paper
  
  @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

I have not had any issues printing on Linux. Although I use ubunutu instead of arch so maybe that's the reason. I also use an Epson printer which I have never had an issue hooking up to any PC over WiFi.

I wonder if any printers run Linux... 🤔
Also just because it's related and may not be common knowledge: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/lpr.1.html
- I bet they do.
  I've learned that the best way to get printers to work universally is to buy a printer with ipp support & force a static IP / DHCP reservation. Seems to universally work with every OS I use in my home with no bloaty drivers.

🤨for what exactly is a printer needed in 2024?
- 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
  
  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.
- 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
  
  Fair, but a string I can still write by hand😂
- Stickers
  
  🤯
- Fax.
  
  Fax?
- Agencies that are still living in the 90s...
  
  😮

💀shart Linux.