You ever think about how you can just print from an ARM Linux system like the Raspberry Pi 400, thanks to printing on Linux somehow being decent now?

Like, you can print from a keyboard. We reinvented the typewriter! Just with more TCP.

@onfy I don't think the hardware architecture is the biggest issue here, also hasn't Linux had network printing for ages? like, the common Unix printing system?

@noiob You're right, the architecture is completely irrelevant here. It works exactly the same as on x64. Though it feels cursed nonetheless, especially as I'm used to it not working on Windows, which is where you'd normally expect hardware to work properly.

I think CUPS historically has a reputation of either not working or being extremely hard to make work. That it just works now, at least in my situation, is really the cursed part.

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@onfy I don't recall ever printing on Linux except at work but I'm.not counting that, since we have actual ops people making stuff work

@noiob Yeah, and normally it'd have taken a lot of work from them... I still remember spending hours trying to get printer drivers to work on Windows. On Linux it's been as simple as getting the HP printer service from apt and running the configuration program to choose my printer model and how it's connected. It downloads some blob and that's that.

@onfy you'd think that there'd be some kind of standardized network print setup, like, just send some EPS to the printer

@noiob @onfy there is, IPP — the Internet Printing Protocol

my printer supports it and it's how I use it from Linux; no drivers, vendor or no (the "driver" for it in CUPS is called "driverless")

it has a custom raster format mandated by the standard, but many printers also support PDF or JPEG in addition

@unascribed @noiob Reasonable idea, though I'm surprised it exists anyway. I also would've assumed postscript would be suitable for this.

Though, it's making me think of that protocol for teapots.

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