this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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Bought a Canon laser printer a decade ago. Only needed a new set of toner and a bunch of paper obviously. Standard power cord, standard USB 1.x cable. Still works in Windows 11. I think I got it working in Linux at some point, but I don't know if it does nowadays, because I probably don't have the mental fortitude to touch CUPS again in this lifetime. (People keep saying audio is a nightmare to set up in Linux. Ohh you clearly haven't tried to set up a printer or you would not be complaining)
My single worst experience with Linux was getting audio to work with an ISA Plug 'n' Play Sound Blaster card back in the late 90s. Eventually I got it to work, but after installing the card I had to dig through documentation and forums to figure out that in addition to audio drivers I needed to install a package for ISA PnP cards, run a tool that came with that to generate a config file, realize that config file contained every hypothetical configuration my card could potentially have all commented out, find and uncomment the actual configuration I wanted the card to use and then restart the isapnp driver. All of that to get basic functionality. For Windows, I literally just installed the card and it worked with basic functionality out of the box, with an option to go to their website and download a driver for some extra functionality specific to that card.
That...soured me on the idea of desktop Linux for several years.
Linux is fine for printers. As long as you don't want to print more than one copy. But even then you just start multiple print jobs. Unless you need a lot of copies. Then Windows or Mac is probably easier.
Strangely, this has never been the case for me (printers, not audio which obviously has sucked in the past). Also if you get a printer that is networked, it generally just works these days, better than my Windows experience.
I've genuinely never had a better printing experience than on Linux. Across multiple distros. just press ctrl+p, printer is already detected, press ok, done. What am I doing wrong?