And just when you like Linux a little too much, it bites you in the ass to remind you why the year of the Linux desktop never happened.

Wifi printer is installed, CUPS test page works, even scanning works. But printing anything else results in the printer spitting out raw postscript with a few random lines per page.

Great. Looks like I'll have to print to PDF, then go to a copy shop and print because printing under Linux is still an unsolved issue.

And yes, that would have worked even with Windows 10. Fuck.

Linux desktop for me is mostly for work. I game on windows, and outside of that, do sparingly little with computers.

@SortOfTested Yeah, as long as I don't want to print, it does work nicely. But I thought such printing problems to be a thing of the past under Linux - only that they're not.

@Fast-Nop Interesting. Which printer?

@IntrusionCM Brother MFC-7840W with drivers from the Brother website. However, the printer isn't the problem since the CUPS test page works correctly. The problem is whatever the printing system is doing.

@Fast-Nop Must not be.

Printers are weird for many reasons.

Could be a fuckup in driver installation.

Sounds like the conversion is failing.

Check CUPS log via journalctl / syslog

This can happen on Windows too, btw...

@IntrusionCM Exactly, printing has been mostly terrible on Windows as well, at least in my experience. Probably because printer drivers (and also printer firmware) in the consumer segment are garbage 9 out of 10 times.

@IntrusionCM If the CUPS test page works, the driver is working. It's some fuckup in the printing system because the CUPS test page is not using whatever else the system is doing.

@saucyatom Windows? Download driver, install it, works. BTDT with this exact printer.

@saucyatom it isn't os specific I guess.

But I'll only did Windows and Linux administration, hence I can only share my experience on those two.

Printers are the "satanical offspring for every kitten that had to die"...

The painful experience of being utterly clueless why it doesn't work is something I'll remember my whole life I guess.

Same driver, Windows / Linux from Image, same installation - works. Suddenly doesn't work. Removing driver, removing CUPS or force choking the windows spool folder and windows spool service, reinstalling. Works again.

Why? Noone knows. Network printers kinda fixed that... I say kinda because the problems usually then popup elsewhere.

Full buffers. Network fuckups. Samba ging bananas. Permission fuckups in network folders. Driver resets paper choice / printer settings somehow... And so on.

@Fast-Nop I wasn't referring to this specific issue you have - I have no experience with printing in Linux. I just wanted to point out that - in my experience - printing in Windows has been awful as well.

Fixed it using the Windows approach: delete the printer and reinstall it.

The underlying reason was that the Brother installer had installed it as "raw printer", which is why it was printing the raw postscript. The installer had been necessary to get the scanner going.

Deleting and reinstalling it via Mint's auto detection now has it as CUPS wrapper instead of raw printer, and that works.

Printers are cunts all around

Most manufacturers probably support windows first, so fair enough it'll probably work better there – but still fuck printers and every single company that makes them...

@Fast-Nop

I cannot help but having a big smile.

Pardon me for being a cunt, but yeah.

That sounds familiar.

Linux is amazing until you have to deal with anything you can't plug in

@superposition To Brother's defence, they even offer a PPD file for that printer. I think that is something highly useful, and CUPS lets me even select such a PPD file - but I've no idea what it's even doing.

Printing on windows isn't much better. Not worth the hassle imo

People are bending backwards too much to prove “Windows sucks” that it becomes funny, in an objective “linux sucks” thread...

@aviophile my position has always been that printers suck

@M3m35terJ05h Printing and scanning on Windows 7 was better with this exact same printer device.

But how would a desktop environment have anything to do with printing?

@linuxxx Who said it had?

@Fast-Nop "why the year of the Linux desktop never happened" - the printing is entirely apart from the desktop/desktop environment.

@linuxxx The "Linux desktop" is not about DEs, but about using Linux on a desktop/laptop computer - as opposed to a server or embedded.

@Fast-Nop Well, on most machines I've come across, the only difference between a server and a desktop were the graphical server (xorg or wayland mostly) and the DE. Neither of those have much to do with printing so...

@linuxxx If that has been the only difference you've ever observed between servers and desktop computers, then you should look more closely. :)