Why does Linux have to make things so damn difficult?
I wanted to modify some invites (bought, not home made) for my kids forthcoming firework party by printing some text and a map on the back.
Straightforward enough: get a map, layout the text etc. Made reasonably short work of this using the GIMP although I still work quicker in Photoshop simply because of more experience with it.
Then came the printing, which turned into an absolute nightmare! I run Fedora Core 2 which uses CUPS for printing which supports my EPSON Stylus Photo 890 well or at least claims to. The printer prints test pages OK, although I occasionally have to remove and re-add the printer queue. escputil (part of the Gimp-Print package) works after I print something – never before. The trouble came when trying to print a non-standard size image onto a non-standard size paper. First of all the GIMP print dialog defaults to sending postscript which the printer didn’t understand. Secondly it would not accept my custom paper size no matter what I did. Thirdly it insisted on adding margins all over the place. Fourthly when I did manage to print something, it would lock open the USB port so I couldn’t print anything else!
The solution? Reboot into Windows XP, quickly re-create the layout in Photoshop CS, add a custom paper size to my printer (which it remembered!) and print. Job done.
Linux took me two hours and didn’t work. XP took me less than half an hour (including printing 40 invites) and did.
XP and the EPSON configuration utility didn’t do it all automatically – I still floundered a bit adding a custom paper size – but it was a damn site more intuitive.
If this were a /. post, amongst the flames would be comments like: “it works for me”, “use a xyz distro”, or “you’re just not used to Linux”. I’ve been using Linux daily for years now, I shouldn’t have to change my distro to get things to work (although I have ordered my Ubuntu CD), and people like Eric S. Raymond have problems with Linux printing so I’m not alone in this – it shouldn’t be this damn hard!
Yep, printing can be really rubbish under Linux. In fact, I rarely print stuff, but when I do, it’s usually a LaTeX-generated document and that means I can just send postscript to the printer … anything else and I often just send it across to the Windows box on the other side of my office (or to SWMBO’s PC at home).<br />
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I print so little that I’ve never really taken the time to do this properly, but it is a limitation.
Heh – I’ve not really had many problems with printing under Linux, but then, like davee, I don’t do that much anyway. <br />
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I think things are 100% better than they were <em>before</em> CUPS came on the scene, but there is definitely room for improvement. As a point of reference, however, it took only a matter of minutes to install and print over the network from Ubuntu, which was nice. Xandros was just as nice, IIRC. So things are getting there. <br />
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It would be nice, as always, if the hardware manufacturers would get a little more involved, but that is always going to take (far too much) time.