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Comment by triyambakam | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a community fork can thrive? This (potentially) personally affects my home print setup.

Who in their right mind is going to dedicate their free time to writing printer drivers in 2020? Forking solves the problem of a poor maintainer holding up things, it doesn't just spawn interested developers out of nowhere.

You would think the printer manufacturers would have an interest in keeping this well maintained. Sadly I can't see it happening.

Printers or open-source, choose one.

Say what you want about HP, but they have open source Linux drivers for all of their printers

https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing

Everything works perfectly.

Owning a few HP devices and using Linux, I’d be careful using “perfectly” in that context. It’s better than others, but for example scanning tends to fail sometimes when libraries get updated etc.

There’s a few more nitpicks around paper selection, dual side printing etc.

Beware, many new multifunction printers require proprietary plugins for scanning (and even some pure printers require it for working at all). https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing/bina...

> Everything works perfectly.

Well, as long as you don't mind changing your init system:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=863974

There are 23 Open PRs.

So clearly some developers are willing to contribute and improve it.

> Maybe a community fork can thrive?

Are you willing to drive that project and work on patches? Because wishing upon "maybe a community fork" is just wishing that someone else should do what you expect to be done.

Maybe not a community fork, but I can think of several Linux Distro "Owners"/Communities/Companies that need a working printer service for their "products", e.g. RedHat/IBM, Suse, Canonical?

Would it be too far fetched if one of them starts maintaining/sheltering a fork - at least to fix bugs? Maybe even with the help of the other interested parties (in an ideal world)?

I cannot imagine IBM wants to sit on a Fedora Workstation release with a buggy printing service.

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