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One Year Later - CUPS Admin Still Lacking?
DopeyDad asks: "OK, it was close to a year ago (Eric's site says July 2004, but I'd swear the original rant came earlier last year) that Eric Raymond's tirade on the unfriendly status of configuring the CUPS printing system on Linux was published. Well, I've been struggling with setting up a new laptop and getting it to talk to my print server, using Fedora Core 3, and nothing seems to have changed -- the admin items for adding a printer are exactly as Eric described them back then -- unclear, confusing, and no where near as friendly as their Win* equivalents. Definitely not something I'd expect my Aunt Ethel to be able to figure out. What's going on here? Granted, FC3 is ready to be replaced, but I don't see any CUPS updates for it. Is work being done with CUPS to address Eric's original complaints, or has this issue fallen off the radar?" For those who are still frustrated with the CUPS GUI, how would you improve it?
By using Mac OS X's interface to CUPS.
:P
Open source programmers work on what is sexy. CUPS isn't sexy. You want someone to do that kind of work, you have to pay them, which is why oos will never have the same polish as commercial OSs (polish doesn't mean themes and icons guys).
One of the problems with FLOSS is that it tends to be written by hackers (which is also one of its biggest benefits, but I digress)...
Hackers want lots of options. They want to be able to configure FIFO settings for serial printers and flow controls, and all the technical nitty gritty.
Grandma doesn't know what the hell a flow control is. All she wants to do is a print a picture the grandkids sent her.
The biggest barrier to FLOSS usability is often overwhelming the user with too many options. A good GUI presents the most basic options you need to accomplish a task, and hides the rest where Grandma won't find it, but where someone who wants to change some deep, dark setting has the option of doing so.
IMHO, Mac OS X Gets It Right. Their configuration dialogs are quite simple, but you can always get under the hood if you need to. That sort of ease of use is what makes OS X a Unix that Grandma can use.
And if it takes messing about with obscure settings to get things to work, then the back end needs to be refined until the system works.
Complexity is at odds with usability, and in general FLOSS tends to be balanced more towards the former than the latter.
I hate to say it but this is one area windows has it all over Linux. On a windows machine I can setup a printer in under 10 seconds. On my Linux box I still have yet to make it work.
In windows setting up a printer is as easy as \\servername\ printersharename
On the server adding that printer to be available to clients is just a matter of knowing what port, or IP its on (which configures a "port" when you provide the IP during setup). This again is a minor job.
I've tried, several times to get CUPS working and ave found it the stupidest sub system in all of UNIX. There has got to be a better way, but I haven't found it yet, has anyone else?
I have been able to get everything I have ever needed working in Linux in the past simply bu reading the man pages and how-to's but neither seems to have the answers for CUPS.
My printer in my house is on a printer server box. Configuring printing should be trivial. Privide a printer type and an IP and GO.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
So nobody is allowed to complain that something is lacking? They have to fix it themselves?
Isn't the idea that the community can do what people can't, or won't do for themselves.
Some people don't have time to do what would have to be done.
Everyone is screaming "just use Yast", "use the webinterface" or "system-config-printer isn't that bad". That's not the point. Here's the scenario:
The user plugs in a printer. There is no step two. If there was no printer before, the printer is now the default. There is no need to tell the machine about it this, no GUI popping up, no config programs to run. If there was a previous default printer the user can right-click its icon representation in some control center to make it the default, otherwise it is just a choice in the print preview dialog.
Stop bitching that CUPS is good enough. Informing us that tool X does what you want it to do is of no worth whatsoever. That is simply taking the easy road. Open Source can, and will given enough time, do better. By failing to see the problems you are just hurting Open Source by your zealotry.
Whether some other operating system does it in some other way is completely irrelevant. The nature of Open Source is to iteratively approach a perfect state. There is no part too small or insignificant, or grand and important, that we can not improve it. Every single wording of every label is open to refinement, every padding issue of every widget open to tweaking to perfection. And when the system plain sucks we rip it out and do it again. The only constant factor in Open Source is change and improvement, 365 days a year 24 hours a day. The shop never closes, on Christmas day there is a million CVS checkins around the globe. That is what Open Source is all about. I put very real code where my mouth is, if your contribution to Open Source consists of "well, it works for me", SHUT THE FUCK UP, in your shortsightedness you hurt Open Source and I as a developer will rather have 5 guys pointing out flaws than you promoting the status quo.
It's like deja vu all over again.