Actually you'll find that most printers and scanners work OOTB on Linux today with minimal configuration using only GUIs. Do you actually use Linux?

My mother purchased a special all-in-one unit (brother MFC-8910DW) for the purpose of printing very large PDF files with mixed legal and letter pages. On windows, Adobe Reader + the printer driver handle selecting which paper tray to pull from depending on the page dimensions in the PDF. But on MacOS and Linux, I had no such luck (using both the built in PDF viewers and Adobe Reader). I am unsure if this is a cups feature that is missing from the driver, or some other limitation. Otherwise, the unit's basic functionality worked fine(though I have the scanner set up so it emails a PDF file using the printer's built in SMTP client). I was really hoping to get my parents on Linux but between this issue and a program that my dad uses that doesn't run on wine, I (for the time being) left them on Windows 7. (I had both of them go out and buy new laptops in the last year or two since both prefer 17" screen sizes, which seem to be going by the wayside and Windows 7, which was getting harder to find computers with win7 oem licenses.)

People do not use 'most printers and scanners'. They want to use that one printer/scanner thing they recently bought, and has only printer drivers available for Linux on the manufacturer's page.

Had a problem with this quite recently, and solved it by buying a new device. And, since, as you said, a lot of them work on Linux with minimal setup needed, I was able to buy it without any issues. But this does not mean that the problem does not exist.

Seconded. I bought an HP printer/scanner only months before moving my parent's desktop to Ubuntu. No frills standard print dialogs and GNOME Simple Scan always work without issue. I'm still surprised as hell (5+ years later) that it works as well as it does, and I didn't do anything to make it happen.

The situation with printers and scanners is very much a result of the manufacturers' managements' being old school and thinking that because they use Windows that it is the only OS out there.

The solution is to do the research first and only buy what has been verified to work with your flavour of Linux. In many cases, you can simply buy a slightly older product off eBay (or similar).

Personally, when shopping I will ask after Linux support and when the salesperson can't help, I explain that I will only consider the product if it is guaranteed to work. It's a quixotic crusade.

> "I'm sorry madam, this is an operating system we don't support"

On the other side, old hardware can get a new lease of life thanks to linux.

I have an old scanner (>10y) still working fine 'out of the box' on linux. My brother wanted to borrow it to use it on his laptop, but the scanner is not supported anymore on recent windows.

Also old low-specs computers which were running winXP at first, can still be useful with up to date linux (browsing internet, reading email, using libreoffice, printing documents, listening music, some people don't need much more).

Yeah - Linux is way in front - I only run Windoze when forced, like last week buying a HTC Vive with no linux support, and boy is it a slow PITA pain after linux.

I could have downloaded an entire linux distro and installed in the time it took to do just one Win10 update the other evening.

Don't get me started, my dad is almost 80 and never paid for a micro$oft license in his life, he used to teach maths and computing at the local university, he started with punchcards, PDP8/11 and VMS and never liked windoze and for good reason.

Notice how you didn't answer any of the parent's points.

Actually, I did, responding to the last line:

"That is the problem with Linux. Of course it's getting better and better but it's not where OSX or Windows is by any means."

That wasn't a particular point the parent had -- just his general conclusion. He listed several pain points none of which was addressed.

I bet you are regarded as fun at parties.

Windoze? micro$oft?

Is this 90s Slashdot?

It's retro chic.

Last time the family installed a printer it was a Samsung networked all in one thingy that worked with CUPS basically out of the box. That said, so far the only "scanning" that happens seems to be to use it as a copier.

>without messing with the command line Why is this required? It's not like people had trouble with the command line in the MS-DOS days. Personally I think people being afraid of the command line is just a matter of cultural dogma, not the command line being actually difficult.

"The command line" (i.e. text-based user interfaces) are not the problem - I'd say the problem is more the specific way windows and nix shells are structured: You get minimal feedback, yet there is an enormous amount of complexity hidden behind the commands. A lot of that stuff is* difficult.

Right out of my head, I could think of the following skills you need to actively learn to put the command line to use:

- tracking a lot of state in your head as opposed to have all state changes directly reflected on the screen.

- memorizing known commands, flags and microsyntaxes (this is not helped by the essay-like writing style of many manpages and the fact that many commands introduce their own auxiliary concepts that you need to understand before you can use the command)

- finding the appropiate new command for a task you want to do

- memorizing interaction between commands (and the shell) to correctly use pipes, quoting and nested commands (find -exec etc)

- "knowing what you are doing". Many commands are built with the explicit assumption that they are to be used by experts only: If such a command is used wrongly, the consequences can be dire.

A GUI provides significant assistance for all of those tasks and provides opportunities for explorative learning. A command line could do the same but in practice doesn't.

> Personally I think people being afraid of the command line is just a matter of cultural dogma, not the command line being actually difficult.

I disagree. My 2-year old niece can barely spell correctly but she is able to select the cartoons she likes on youtube using an iPad. How old do you think she'd be until she figures out how to list files in a dir using the cli?

Mind you, no one ever taught her how to use the iPad, she just did.

That's valid, but only for illiterates. I don't see how this applies to anyone beyond the age of 10 or so - I know I ditched Windows at the age of 12, at least, and English isn't even my native language.