Linux

Because printing in Linux both works and is supported and not supported and hope that there are drivers and they work.

For example, I have a brother printer and in both arch and Ubuntu/mint the printer worked out of the box. But I was missing features like double sided printing. So I had to download drivers for it.

In arch the drivers were on the AUR, so I was printing is seconds.

In Ubuntu/mint they weren’t in my package manager, so I had to go to brother’s website and hope they had drivers. Brother did and while it took a bit it did work too. No worse than windows.

Funny thing is, I don't own a printer, so when I need documents printed I go to the local library. Their computers run Linux, and of all the times I've gone to get a print done it's been an extremely flawless experience. No fuss, no hassle, just load up the document and print it.

I use printer with a USB personally. No issues with that but I got an HP printer that is really weird with the network stuff

apt purge cups-* libcups* libppd*

Thank me later.

My brother needed the driver installed in debian on Qubes but has been flawless beyond that. When I was still running arch it just worked out of the box

I have a Postscript 3 compatible ipp network color laser printer for about 15 years now and it works without any issues with Linux, way better then it does from Windows. So I never understood way they say that printing is cumbersome with Linux.

My Xerox works way better than on osx.

If you have a hp printer they got a official software for it

It depends on the brand I guess. Some Canon Pixma did immediately worked with my distro, like literally zero setup required. However, it refuses duplexing. It just won't do it. Not driverless and not with gutenprint, although it lists the specific model, not when setting it as the default, not when setting it per job.

Yet it works on Android no problem.

Recently ran into an issue with Endeavour OS where the built in printer program would give errors when trying to add my network ecotank printer.

Tried using cups terminal and it worked the first time, and is still working weeks later.

So some of the GUI printer apps that distros ship with have issues apparently, but I don't know the extent of it.

I've never bien able to get printing to work on arch, void or nixos.

For some reason though debian, fedora, open s'use ans their derivatives have been easier than on windows

An u until live CD will find my decade old HP laser and print to it without any work.

Getting my NIXOS to print at the same printer? About an hour.

Are you old enough to remember Winmodems and NDISWrapper? There used to be some hardware that was so cheap that the Windows driver needed to do some of the basic work. They were never compatible with anything but Windows (and maybe 98 or XP at that). I’m sure there were some printers like that.

Combined with poor driver support early on, and a lack of standards (at least on the consumer end), and the need to have a separate PPD file for every make and model of printer, and printing used to be a mess. (It almost got bad again when Microsoft tried pushing their XPS format as a replacement for PostScript, PCL, PDF, and EPS, but that didn’t catch on.)

Apple buying CUPS (and hiring its lead developer) was great for the community. They got it working all but perfectly. I’ve never had a problem printing on Linux; HP, Brother, or otherwise.

FYI: the developer quit Apple and forked his project into OpenCUPS, but I haven’t tried that.