Printing still sucks. Out of the box Ubuntu with my WF-3540...

Add Printer shows the printer. Great! I hit Add and it says "Here's the OpenPrinting driver for it". Great!

I click "Use this driver". It spins. And then acts like nothing has happened. I click it again. Same. I hit Cancel. Oh. Now my printer is installed... with the Generic Text Driver.

So I go to OpenPrinting.org directly and download the driver myself. Oh, now I see the issue. A whole bunch of dependencies that are prompted for here, but weren't prompted for or installed in the printing dialog.

Okay, let's try this again.

Printer Found. Great. Add it. Okay, my driver is in the driver list. Progress. Select, and Add.

"Success!".

I hit Print Test Page. Nothing comes out. "Processing..." Nothing.

Then I look.

And despite having found my printer on the network, Add Printer has added it "connected to localhost". WTF?

Alright. Delete printer.

Add printer. Ignore the found printer, find my printer's IP address manually, and add it that way. Go through things and now I am actually able to print, and everything works great.

But holy crap.

It's 2017.

It's Ubuntu.

How the hell is something this simple this broken?

I have the same thing happen when I download the .deb file for Chrome from the site, open it in the Software Installer (or whatever it's called), it opens an icon in my tray and sits there forever, doing nothing. It's not until I do a sudo dpkg -i that I know that dependencies are missing and that's the reason it won't install. Explain that to a newbie.

Don't use the apps, use cups directly. It's not right but it'll get you printing.

http://localhost:631

Is it just me or did they forgot to add css? Nothing wrong with a HTML-BASED backend. But for Tux sake, get some fancy Frontend-Dev to have it look nice out of the box

Sleep has never been a problem for me on any Thinkpad with Ubuntu. Debian, on the other hand, was nothing like pain for bluetooth, wifi, suspend. And don't get me started about the UMTS dongle I once bought that was useless under Debian but worked out of the box (even with a wizard) on Ubuntu. Then again, that dongle never really worked under Windows either (the drivers it auto-installed caused blue screens, and when they didn't, the abominably ugly software that came with it, never found the dongle).

Just as a counterpoint, I use Debian on a Thinkpad as well, and while I don't print, wifi and sleep work without problems, and so did a SIM card I put into it for 3G - it 'just worked', and the only config I needed to do was pick which one of my ISP's "AP" names to use. That was surprisingly easy.

As another counter-counterpoint: I use Debian on a T460, and sound and wifi don't work out of the box. While it may be OOTB for some people that doesn't mean it's everyone. I think I've only had one laptop in the past 10 years (~4 laptops) that has worked OOTB with Linux.

I've had an IBM Thinkpad (2003-2009), a Lenovo netbook (2009-2011), a Sager-branded Clevo (2011-2016), and an HP Envy 15t (current). The Thinkpad...well, 2003 was still a rough time. Especially early on, the basics worked, but everything else was a fight. The netbook had to be connected to ethernet to grab the Broadcom wireless firmware. The Sager had Intel+Nvidia dual GPUs before that was a well-suported use case. The HP is the first machine I can think of where everything "just worked". I improved battery life by tweaking some things, but it was a longer fight to get Windows 7 working on it.

Comparing those to Windows installs on the same hardware at the time I bought them, the HP was lovely, the Lenovo was about equivalent, and the IBM and Sager stank (it'd be cheating to say that loading modern distros on them would be much nicer ;-) )

Oh, I just mean that some things work really smoothly - it's not just a basket case. I didn't have to install or modify anything with the 3G modem and the network manager just took care of it (and prefers a wifi connection if one is live), which was surprising. This is an option that the biggest prestige laptop maker doesn't even offer.

Debian in particular won't work OOTB on most computers because their philosophy excludes proprietary drivers in the base install... and wifi loves proprietary drivers. That's a 'Debian-philosophy-specific' issue, not a 'linux' issue.

All of those being moving targets...