Printing always used to be a dark art. I had a Dell colour laser that was completely unsupported and impossible to use on anything except Windows or OS X, but which could print PDFs from a USB stick or FTP / SMB share, so printing on FreeBSD involved print to file on a network share and then press the buttons on the device. Before that I had a Brother printer with terrible Windows and OS X drivers, so ended up setting up a FreeBSD box as a print server pretending to be a generic PostScript printer and sending rasterised data (a 700MHz Pentium 3 was a lot faster at rasterising PostScript than the 50MHz MIPS core in the printer!). I didn’t have a printer for ages and eventually bought a modern Brother all-in#one thing that supports a bewildering number of print protocols. I’m pretty sure CUPS supports at least six of them.
Perhaps worth noting that macOS has used CUPS since 2002 and bought the company in 2007. It is still the printing system on macOS. So this is not THAT different from what a Mac is doing under the hood when you set up a new printer, although of course the UIs are slicker and the printer companies actually document how to do it.
Printing always used to be a dark art. I had a Dell colour laser that was completely unsupported and impossible to use on anything except Windows or OS X, but which could print PDFs from a USB stick or FTP / SMB share, so printing on FreeBSD involved print to file on a network share and then press the buttons on the device. Before that I had a Brother printer with terrible Windows and OS X drivers, so ended up setting up a FreeBSD box as a print server pretending to be a generic PostScript printer and sending rasterised data (a 700MHz Pentium 3 was a lot faster at rasterising PostScript than the 50MHz MIPS core in the printer!). I didn’t have a printer for ages and eventually bought a modern Brother all-in#one thing that supports a bewildering number of print protocols. I’m pretty sure CUPS supports at least six of them.
Perhaps worth noting that macOS has used CUPS since 2002 and bought the company in 2007. It is still the printing system on macOS. So this is not THAT different from what a Mac is doing under the hood when you set up a new printer, although of course the UIs are slicker and the printer companies actually document how to do it.
I found that a horrifying read, TBH. I never tried printing from it, and now, I don’t want to.
Thank you for feedback - how should I write it differently then? :)
Seems my reply was lost. :-(
I didn’t mean your post was horrifying! It’s fine. It’s good. I mean the process of setting up printing on FreeBSD is horrifying.