can we talk about driver support in linux.

duncesplayed, 9 months ago

I had a similar situation.

I had an old laser printer that was officially unsupported on OS X. Meaning that they had a driver for OS X for a similar model, but not exactly the same model, that supposedly worked for it, but they deliberately did not let you use it with my model of printer. Found some crazy instructions online that told you to install the drivers, then change the driver with a hex editor to force it to recognize your printer as a different model. It worked, occasionally, intermittently. I spend like half a week trying to get it to work under OS X and it just wouldn’t work reliably.

Tried a Windows computer. Wasted half a day installing a driver, uninstalling a driver, plugging in, unplugging, turning on, turning off, but it just couldn’t recognize it.

Booted into Linux and hit “print” and it worked perfectly. Didn’t even need to install a driver.

excitingburp, 9 months ago

Printers have always been an issue, especially recently. They love their home-grown (likely inaccessible, I might add) UIs. We had an HP and it was a complete shitshow - the Windows driver would crash whatever app invoked the print dialog for the second time. HP suggested installing their app from the Microsoft store - absolute garbage as you might imagine.

Shit worked flawlessly with Linux.

I replaced the heap of steaming shit with a Xerox Laser printer. Given their corporate background they have less weird shit going on, and that did pay off for my wife’s Windows machine. Oh boy, is it still so much more reliable under Linux. I need to install a PPD, which means digging into the CUPS management and things could definitely use improvement there (it works flawlessly, but it’s confusing and ugly).

Scanning is sometimes a little hit-and-miss though.

westyvw, 9 months ago

I have an HP printer, unfortunately, but it is what it is.

Linux prints and scans no problem, setup was as easy as picking the printer from the list.

The windows laptop kicking around here will not. No matter what I try, I cannot make it work.

jayandp, 9 months ago

Have a relative that just got a new laptop with Windows 11, but their printer wouldn’t work with it. It was a fairly old thing, but it worked fine on Windows 10. Turns out, the manufacturer no longer distributes the driver directly, and instead just shares it through Windows Update, which would be super convenient, except the driver is only listed for Windows 10 devices, and won’t install on Windows 11. So dumb.

Quazatron, 9 months ago

Me and my family are still using a (let’s call it) vintage HP LaserJet 1100 connected to an HP JetDirect connected to a wifi router. Hey, it works, why throw away a perfectly good printer just because it’s old?

The other day I tried to print from a Windows 10 machine. After much searching of drivers on the internet and pulling of hairs, I gave up and copied the file to my Linux box and printed from there.

The point I’m making is that your hardware will have a longer support life with Linux.

imnapr, 9 months ago

I just moved and I was literally in shock when Mint auto-added my Dads printer INSTANTLY and I printed on it first try no problem. I have literally had so many issues with printers (and this one) and I honestly expected printing to be out of the question on Linux so I’m definitely impressed.

PassiveLemon, 9 months ago

Dude my random ass Ubuntu vms will instantly see the printer and work but first party apps for HP printers in Windows will struggle. Crazy

Synthead, 9 months ago

The vendor’s choice of hardware licensing, software licensing, and effort to work with the mainline kernel plays big roles in this compatibility. You almost never hear about Linux having a problem with Intel graphics, but you do with Nvidia. You also almost never hear about issues with Intel 802.11 cards, but you do with Realtek.

It’s not Linux’s fault, really. If you have a bad neighbor distributing proprietary stuff that completely refuses to add support or work with you, the next worst step is having users that scapegoat Linux and blame it for not supporting said hardware.

Thankfully, there has been a big push for Linux compatibility lately, so things have gotten better, even with closed hardware and proprietary vendor blob drivers. But it is often a nightmare of licensing issues, often produces unstable or poor-performing drivers, and the effort to make it work better often lands on Linux, not the vendor.

Look at this post. Not once was the license of the Brother or HP drivers discussed. Do you know what they are? Are the sources available? Are you running blobs? Was the support reverse engineered by users, or offered by the vendors? Before your moment of appreciation, you should take two steps back and look at the big picture.

While Linux runs on approximately 2% of workstations as of this writing, it is the dominant platform that runs the Internet, and is often the operating system of choice for embedded platforms. A long time ago, Linux support was mostly fostered by volunteers, but we often see hardware support as something a responsible vendor would maintain now.

But that said, I really do appreciate the ease of Linux support. DKMS has helped this significantly, too. Most of the flow is to install a package and possibly reboot. The kind people of your operating system, the strong and persistent efforts of kernel maintainers, and possibility the work done by vendors has made Linux compatibility an act of grace when everything falls in place.