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Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

theregister.com

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Re: Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

#61

Post by acdha »

Gigachad wrote: post #52
breadwinner wrote: post #9

Printing at home is so horrible. I have a printer connected to my Wifi router. It changes IP every time I reboot. When it changes IP, Windows can't find it. I can give the printer a static IP but how many people know to do this? Wifi has been around for more than 2 decades. Isn't that enough time to figure out a solution?

I don’t bother owning a home printer. They basically all suck. Easier to just go to the library and print.

1. Buy a Brother laser printer

2. Put it on your Wi-Fi

3. There is no step three

This is basically like when people say dishwashers don’t do a good job because they’ve only bought ones designed by American MBAs. HP and Epson made good products in the previous century but are now customer-milking operations and it’s better to pretend they don’t exist.

Re: Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

#62

Post by kop316 »

breadwinner wrote: post #24
jamescostian wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be your router giving it a new IP address, but the printer itself hopefully has a static MAC address. Check your router settings for static IP assignment, they may be under a section called DHCP. Over there you could give it a static IP address for its current MAC address EDIT: this comment no longer makes sense after the parent comment was edited. It used to be explicitly asking for help and didn't mention…

You missed the point. I wasn't asking for help on how to assign a static IP address. My point was that ordinary people shouldn't have to know what an IP address is, let alone what a static IP address is, in this day and age.

For the record, printers have been so bad with firmware/software that it literally inspired RMS to make GNU: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201...

Re: Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

#63

Post by code_biologist »

turtlebits wrote: post #57
Gigachad wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t bother owning a home printer. They basically all suck. Easier to just go to the library and print.

Get an old brother laser printer, they are rock solid. Better yet, setup Airprint as well. The novelty of printing from my phone never wears off. (coming from an old head).

I just crossed the decade mark with my Brother HL-2240, purchased in June 2013. I put a Raspberry Pi + CUPS on it for network printing. The resolution is a little low and I wish I had color, but I did buy the printer for literally $60 new.

Re: Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

#64

Post by skykooler »

gerdesj wrote: post #46
breadwinner wrote: post #9

Printing at home is so horrible. I have a printer connected to my Wifi router. It changes IP every time I reboot. When it changes IP, Windows can't find it. I can give the printer a static IP but how many people know to do this? Wifi has been around for more than 2 decades. Isn't that enough time to figure out a solution?

Ideally your printer advertises itself via Bonjour/Avahi/SLP or whatevs. Ideally Windows receives these adverts and connects you to your printer. One or the other gets it wrong, with monotonous regularity. IPP is print anywhere and it sounds like its been branded "Mopria". I ditched a thing called HPLIP at home at least five years ago which used to be the cutting edge for Linux printing on HP printers. The bloke that…

Of course, not all routers (particularly combo router/modems provided by your ISP) support multicast DNS, so often this isn't an option.

Re: Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

#65

Post by trimethylpurine »

mortenjorck wrote: post #56
trimethylpurine wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bonjour struggles to find printers much more than Windows. My Windows users just click add printer and it just works. And let's not talk about file shares. Macs literally can't connect to any file shares except Windows ones (since AFP is out of support), and then only with Samba, and only with Apple's botched implementation of Samba which crashes, because it needs to create metafile databases on said shares, if a sha…

I can’t comment on the file share tangent, but in my experience with a Bonjour-equipped Brother laser printer over the past eight or so years, I don’t think I can recall it failing to connect once. Granted, I’m on a Mac and I print about five times a year, so YMMV.

I don't doubt that a one computer, one printer, scenario is any problem for any OS. You'll see who the ugly one is when the kids play together. File sharing isn't a tangent. The purpose of Bonjour is to couple printing and file sharing as a network discovery protocol.

Re: Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

#66

Post by strangescript »

breadwinner wrote: post #9

Printing at home is so horrible. I have a printer connected to my Wifi router. It changes IP every time I reboot. When it changes IP, Windows can't find it. I can give the printer a static IP but how many people know to do this? Wifi has been around for more than 2 decades. Isn't that enough time to figure out a solution?

No one says "I can't want to learn to code so I can program windows printer drivers". At the same time no company wants to pay the appropriate amount to hire people that can do this well. These two concepts come together in a fantastic display of mediocrity.

Re: Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

#69

Post by devmor »

marcod wrote: post #47
breadwinner wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully people at Apple thought this can be easier. They came up with Bonjour... Bonjour is apparently also known as ZeroConf [1]. Microsoft is behind the times. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-configuration_networking

The only thing I know about Bonjour is that I had to uninstall it every time after installing iTunes on my PC.

I used to do that too because I didn’t know what it was or why I would want it. Now I intentionally have it installed without iTunes since its so handy.

Re: Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

#70

Post by ubercow13 »

sp332 wrote: post #31
breadwinner wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that on a Mac? Windows doesn't seem to support it.

It's called "Bonjour" on Windows and Mac. Windows doesn't have support out of the box, but you can get it. https://learn.adafruit.com/bonjour-zeroconf-networking-for-w... Edit: until build 1703 in 2017. Huh!

Windows uses mdns natively now. That article is 10 years old.
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