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Comment by zaarn | Hacker News Reader

I use ArchLinux, so as close to upstream as it gets. The CUPS printer setup dialog, both on GNOME and KDE looks the same; it's complicated and barely usable. It hasn't changed in the past 10 years either. The bugs have persisted for almost the same time.

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It sure didn't change much (if we're talking about the same dialog). This is a video of adding a printer in 2009 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe0QE9oEp0A

And this is a more in depth video for Ubuntu 18 with a more polished interface but not very different https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGz1RUqCzkI

They don't look complicated to me.

Then there is the hard way. Check at 4:00 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En2DJAMpwmY

That's already using this hard way though, there's a great big "add" button in the top right that spots most printers automatically just like in Windows. The advanced dialog your first two links use only applies to printers that cannot be configured automatically (often because they require additional files and config that you can't just repackage without licensing issues).

I use Arch. I had to set up a network printer yesterday. I tried to add it via the Printer Manager, and it would crash every single time it tried to add the driver. This behavior persisted through a reboot.

I eventually had to USB drive it to a windows computer to print.

Linux printing is a crapshoot

I would disagree. At least the gnome printer settings did not only change (for some time you had both in parallel on Fedora), they are not complicated at all?

Last time I checked, the printer dialog will first ask you what protocol to use to talk to the printer.

It lists a few common options, such as JetDirect, PCL, TCP/IP, etc. Whatever. Doesn't really matter, it's just poor UX. Most end users have no idea what any of this means and don't know what to pick. You'd possibly find out in the printer manual, though mine didn't specify what protocols it understood very clearly, it was written in Appendix B or something and not in the index at the back.

In most cases, you now enter the hostname or IP of the printer to add. While sometimes necessary on Windows, autodiscover on linux is still a shitshow and doesn't work except for HP printers. (Laser HP in Color is expensive).

On Windows, the very same printer that took me 30 minutes to setup after I wrangled it through the initial setup dialogue, took all of 20 seconds to setup; "Settings" -> "Devices" -> "Add Device" -> "Lexmark Printer". Done. It printed perfectly fine.

On the other hand, my printer to this day cannot print directly from firefox through CUPS. Only from other PDF viewers.

edit: from what I can see in a sibling comment, the add printer dialog in gnome is the same it has always been atleast up to Ubuntu 18.04, unless they made radical changes to Ubuntu 20.04 to the add printer dialog, which I don't think is the case since I haven't heard about any larger printer-related changes in 20.04

Are you talking about the local web interface (localhost:631)? Why would it matter whether you're using GNOME or KDE?

The web interface is hostile af, the standard GUI dialog to add printers is fairly hostile as well, even if you get autodiscovery to work (not always, not in all cases out of the box), it's still not friendly for average end users.

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