What kind of printer? In my experience, networked printing is almost always much easier than USB.

I've had really good luck with Brother and Ricoh printers. From regular computers, network printing works very well (from Windows, Mac, and Linux), and their Android apps are also quite good (though they don't support the native Android printing subsystem, so I have to "share" files to them).

It is probably not the printer, but the fact that we switched to Suddenlink for Internet service and all of our laptops except for my two Linux laptops stopped working wirelessly with the printer.

Anyway, my wife is OK with physically connecting to the printer and I almost never need a hard copy.

Maybe you have some sort of (wireless) client isolation feature in your router turned on. Its sometimes called "AP Isolation".

I find that Windows machines wont "discover" my Canon printer like OSX+Bonjour does, so if the IP address changes you have to delete and reinstall it. :/ Might be OP's problem?

Have you installed the Windows bonjour client from Apple?

I was recently trying to print from Windows inside virtualbox on my Mac to a wireless Canon printer. After installing bonjour, Windows found and install the drivers for the Canon but when I "printed" to it only a blank page would come out. Sigh, so close.

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL999?locale=en_US ?

That would explain why the machine with iTunes works. Windows isn't my daily driver anymore but I'll definitely try that! Yeah Canon printers always seem to work after installing the monolithic Canon drivers, but tbh it just feels wrong.

Make a reservation for the printer in your DHCP - then itll never lose its IP and nothing else will ever take it.

Yeah that issue was when I was using the ISP-provided gateway combo. I'm running a PF box right now and it hasn't been reassigned in months. But yeah assigning a static ip would fix it. It's just annoying when its a family member who doesn't know that can be done.

Ah. I have gotten into the habit of giving my printers static IPs (still assigned via DHCP). That probably makes things more stable.

Same here, also, I never run the printer itself wirelessly, always wired, with a static IP. Rarely have issues... now printing over the internet to my home printer sometimes hiccups... whats worse is when friends print to you, and you've become their default, and suddenly you have a 150pg document printing from nowhere... that they didn't mean to send to you.

Printers supporting the good ol' JetDirect protocol, where you simply fling bytes @ port 9100, almost always work easy-peasy. It can't get easier than Postscript or PCL printers, where you can print by cat file.ps | nc -w 1 192.168.0.100 9100. It's pretty hard to screw that up.

Printers using that INSANELY over complicated Web Services for Devices (WSD) seem to have a huge footprint on Windows PCs, are resource intensive, require extra running services on the PC, seem to have a hard time with multiple instances of the printer on the same network, etc.

FWIW, you can screw it up pretty easily when you don't own your own router (it comes from your ISP), and it has some sort of subnet isolation thing going on.

This workflow always made more sense to me. Until they figure out a way to wirelessly deliver the printed page from the printer to my hand, I'm going to have to haul my ass over to the printer anyway.

Maybe a printer that can fold and launch paper airplanes....

The printing takes time. Might as well let it do that while you're walking, rather than waste time doing it all sequentially.

So true. Printing, copying technology seems so out of date and stone age like compared to other consumer electronics. Why cant I jsut print something off my iphone on any generic printer ? Why do printers come up with so much junkware ? Why are the prices of ink so damn expensive ?

I think Apple, MS or someone else must come up with a good printer and kill rest of the printer industry.

Printers are crap because most people don't need to print much, so most printers that are sold are basically the equivalent of the shaving stick that's sold only to enable the sales of replacement razor blades (ink cartridges).

Ink is expensive because again: Most people don't print much, and most people have printers that that have some very specific ink cartridge and will blindly buy the manufacturer brand ink because it's easier that way.

If you print much, pay for a reasonable laser printer, and your experience and cost per page are both much better.

> I think Apple, MS or someone else must come up with a good printer and kill rest of the printer industry.

They did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter

Everything since then has been garbage.

I've found that the only way to get network printing to work reliably is to buy a generic postscript printer and use an old linux machine (perhaps a raspberry pi) as a dedicated print server. I used to recommend that people buy enterprise gear, but lately I've had mixed results even with those - the printer in my office needs to be rebooted daily. Whatever you do, stay far away from consumer-grade networked printers. Half the time they won't even implement CUPS/IPP or LPD, they tunnel USB over ethernet and use the same shitty USB drivers that an intern wrote in 1997. Best to avoid printers altogether, really.

This. All my problems went away when I bought a Brother laser printer, and connected my Raspberry Pi to it running CUPS. No issues with discovery on Mac/Windows/Linux.

My solution has been DDWRT on my router, acting as a print server with the printer plugged into it. It has worked great, and never have issues like I did before when the printer was plugged into the computer. It always just works.

I also have a CS degree and gave up wireless printing in favor of USB printing at home. Wireless printing proved unreliable over many attempts. USB printing works reliably every time. We have to walk to over the printer anyway to get the printed documents out. Taking the laptop with us is hardly much more effort.

I try get my family members to use USB printer over wireless when possible as well. Wireless printing is more prone to failure, as chan happen when a wireless device changes IP, SSID or password.

I'm glad it's not just me! I've tried so often! I've moved to just-postscript emulation, and then every multicast-dns trick I can think of. I generally blame cups.

He said it worked for him on his two Linux laptops.