Oh God, this brought back a traumatic memory. I was hanging out after hours at our office to look after a meetup group that was using our space that night. Nothing tricky, make sure people can get in, keep the lights on, make sure nobody sets the place on fire.
I was plugging away on my personal laptop which had Linux on it. Having a great time doing something or other when one of the meetup organisers approached me with a USB stick and asked if I could help them print out some signs to help people know where to go.
My install was rock solid, fast and set up exactly the way I wanted, but in that moment none of that mattered because it was me who froze. I thought back to all the decisions that lead me to that situation, even the conversation with a coworker a few months ago about Linux who literally said “I love Linux but one day I’m just afraid I’ll have to print something or whatever and I won’t be able to”. How foolish I was to dismiss the wisdom in his words that day, and now my worst nightmare had come to pass.
I swallowed hard, looked the organiser in the eyes, and told them I couldn’t help them. I didn’t even try. Best to rip the band-aid off, disappoint them now and get it over with. After the glaring admission left my mouth I waited for the inevitable response. I was a fraud, nothing more than a self proclaimed computer geek who couldn’t accomplish a rudimentary task despite all my time studying and tinkering. It was over, I guess it wasn’t imposter syndrome after all, I really was an imposter and now I’d been discovered.
But instead the the organiser just smiled and said “that’s totally ok, we were just a bit disorganised and didn’t print it before coming this time. Thanks for your help anyway!” And everything was fine. This time.
I would have tried anyway. Sometimes Linux works better with printing than Windows, some times the other way round. It just depends what the printer is and how you have your system setup.
Just say how it is. “I can try but printers are notorious for making simple things difficult.”
Yeah exactly. Chances are it would have worked provided they installed CUPS - which isn’t hard or slow on arch after all it’s not Gentoo. But if it didn’t at least you have defused expectations while showing you are still willing to try. Something like: I don’t have it setup on this laptop but I will try and get it working quickly, but no promises.
Now that brother, is storytelling.
Many years ago, my aunt bought an old, terribly specced laptop and couldn’t get Windows to run on it. I installed Ubuntu and everything was fine - she could check her email and browse toxic conspiracy theories on Facebook and all was good with the world.
Two years later when visiting I got my first support request - would I mind showing her how to print something? No problem, but would you mind showing me what you were trying? She was selecting menu items to send to a virtual printer, not the one on the network. I show her the correct printer to send to and the thing prints. Easy. Out of curiosity, I check the outbox queue for the virtual printer. Over a hundred documents, going back two years.
For two years she’d been unable to print, and every single time she’d ever attempted to print something she’d followed the exact same steps that didn’t work, and just accepted that this was the way things were.
SMH.
Weirdly enough I’ve found it much easier to print on linux. It just works out of the box.
If it doesn’t it is definetly the printers manufacturer fault 😅
It’s something we can thank Apple for. CUPS is the standard printing system on practically all non-Windows OSes, and Apple hired its developer and did a lot of work on improving it in the 2000s and 2010s.
