Ironically, printers are now easier to get working on Linux than they are on Windows. The whole no-driver setup in the unix world murders the "must install this driver and possibly restart" shenanigans on Windows.

I was quite surprised when I switched my main dev machine to Linux and the printer not only appeared by itself, but worked out of the box.

But the issue here is not inherently with Linux. It is more so with vendors of printers making drivers. If Brother feels that there are enough people running Linux and want to own a Brother printer, they will make the driver. Maybe that is the issue we need solve, or at least the part we need to be vocal about. If brother gets a significant number of emails asking for linux support, perhaps they will finally make linux a first class citizen?

I think it's interesting you chose Brother here, because Linux support is a first class citizen -- they not only offer CUPS drivers, they offer Deb and RPM packages that also set up dependencies.

I just picked the first vendor off the top of my head and Brother came to mind. Feel free to replace it with any other vendor/manufacturer. In no way is it meant to single out brother as being poor on Linux.

> But the issue here is not inherently with Linux. It is more so with vendors of printers making drivers.

Users don't care. For them things either work or not. Users are not going to e-mail Brother or Nvidia or Microsoft to fix their issues with printers, video cards or Onedrive. How is that so hard to understand?

If the vendors got metrics that showed that desktop linux user share was enough and viable enough, they would. The issue is, Linux users are a small share of the desktop market. But, if that number grew, it changes. Hardware vendors would port their drivers over once the potential revenue of customers on a different platform outweighs the cost in doing so. Otherwise, I don't think Brother or Nvidia really give a damn if an end user is running Windows or Linux, they just care that enough of those user exists in their respective ecosystem to justify the engineering costs.

This is true, but still - people want to print documents. They don't want to run Linux (or Windows). If they can't print documents, that's a problem.

The solution was Google Cloud Print, IMO. That was a great idea. Who cares what you run, as long as it can connect to the internet you can print. I don't know how in-depth it got with the various crazy menu systems

That brings up an excellent point. Services like these start to eventually render driver support useless. I haven't heard of Google cloud print, but I just looked it up. Even though it looks to be EOLed, there are alternatives still going, just not from google. My HP printer has an app. I can push documents to the app that goes up to HP then comes back down on to my printer, if I have my printer configured with that. I think my last printer, which was a bother had something similar where I could set it up on my home network in such a way that I can just email a document to a special bother email address which then prints it out on the brother printer.

People pick everything based on marketing.

Maybe until they get burned.