Reply to post: Re: Linux on the desktop, and printing

So the 'Year of Linux' never happened. When is it Chrome OS's turn?

Palpy

Re: Linux on the desktop, and printing

It's odd. Forum comments seem to indicate HP printers work best with Linux, and Brother printers can be problematic. I just (two hours ago) put a new Brother printer on my home network, and my Linux distro found it and could print to it immediately. No driver installation, nothing to download, nothing to configure.

Mind you, Brother offers Linux drivers in .deb and .rpm formats on their website. But... I didn't need the .deb. It just worked. WTF?

I really, really do get that with heterogeneous hardware and proprietary drivers, installation of various drivers on various platforms can be fraught with difficulty. I was there, but not recently. And I can understand that a package like Microsoft Office is really built to run on Microsoft Windows. (MS would be bone stupid to do otherwise; Office is their bread-and-butter-and-beer.) (I imagine SatNad on a corner with a cardboard placard: "Ruined by FOSS! Anything helps!")

But my very personal, very particular experience is that I have no more trouble with Linux than I had when I was running Windows. And if you count the anti-virus, hijack, ransomware thing -- then it's much, much less trouble.

I hunted down an Ubuntu-out-of-the-box mini-laptop several years ago. ASUS. Bloody little beast. The partitioning was insane -- a FAT32 partition on Linux? Really? And if they had decided in cold blood to sabotage the experience, ASUS could not have done it worse. Bad touchpad, bad keyboard layout, underpowered CPU, and soldered-in memory. At the same time, they were of course selling pretty damned good laptops with Windows pre-loaded.

And that, my friends, is why we can't have nice Linux things. Unless we wipe-and-install ourselves, which most users won't do. Of course, if they had to wipe-and-install to run Windows, they'd go frothing mad.

Aye, life's a mug's game for sure. The universe is black as Satan's dreams, and there ain't no justice nowhere.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon