Linux Printing: A Curious Mix of Yuck and Excellence, Pts 1 & 2

Carla Schroder gives her usual honest take on the state of Linux printing today...

"I've long been a fan of CUPS, which has been the standard printing subsystem on Linux for several years now. It networks printers automatically on Linux, and combined with Samba it does the same for Windows clients. But my affections are wearing thin; after all these years CUPS still does not provide a user- or admin-friendly interface or useful notifications, and setting up automatic driver downloads for Windows clients is still a black art. The printer interfaces in Gnome and KDE are useless duplications of effort that don't offer much that is really helpful, and the KDE printer manager has long been notoriously buggy, though it has improved a lot over time. We miss out on a lot of CUPS' useful functionality, such as printing over the Internet and connecting Windows clients without Samba, because the interface and documentation skip over the gnarly bits of how to actually set these up."

[Read more of Part 1]

[Read Part 2]