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Comment by arthurfm | Hacker News Reader

Yes.

https://medium.com/@hammen/significant-changes-in-macos-10-1...

11. As expected and previously announced, support for 32-bit processes/i386 architectures has been removed.

Printer drivers are also deprecated in Catalina. A future version of macOS will remove support for them completely.

24. “lpadmin: Printer drivers are deprecated and will stop working in a future version of CUPS”. man lpadmin on a macOS Catalina system for more details. It seems that Apple wants admins to move from lpd/smb/socket (JetDirect) to AirPrint.

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I have an old-ish laser printer (purchased in 2005 or so) which works fine, I really don't want to replace it because of an OS upgrade. My dad's got an even older laser printer (purchased probably in the early 1990s) which also works fine, I don't think he's going to want to replace it either.

Hopefully by "printer drivers" they mean "printer manufacturer supplied drivers" and not "all drivers that aren't AirPrint". My printer uses a driver that's built in to MacOS, hopefully it can continue to do so.

If it does get dropped you may want to look into getting a raspberry pi. I have a couple of old JetDirect printers, and a plotter, that continue to work. I added AirPrint functionality so I could send documents from my iPhone. It's been far more useful than that.

This is something I've briefly looked into and forgotten about a number of times over the years (mainly so I can print from my iPad). I even have unused Raspberry Pis that are ready to be put into service for this.

I’ve had to run a Windows vm because a not-so-old but not widely released canon laser printer just won’t work under cups. It’s a pain but hey, still works.

No the printer driver problem is that printer manufacturers insist on using proprietary formats to communicate with their printer.

They invariably and up doing terrible things (why does a printer driver ever need a kext).

What they are saying is “your printer better support generic content formats” - AirPrint already forces that concept

Printers supporting AirPrint: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201311 (it is a loooong list, basically any printer designed since 2010).

I would assume that there would be a lot of professional printers that don’t support AirPrint.

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