Pressed About Printing

Back in 2008, when I was still in sixth form college, I picked up a cheap HP Deskjet with an in-built scanner. I never had any problems with it, the toner cartridges were reasonably-priced, and it worked beautifully with any operating system from which I chose to print. That thing paid for itself multiple times over in university assignment deadlines that I didn't miss. It was a good little inkjet printer, and we will sadly never see its like again.

After 8 solid years though, the little printer that could was struggling, and I was using a Raspberry Pi and a CUPS server to make it WiFi accessible. So in 2016, I thought it was time to replace it with a modern WiFi enabled Epson printer. It was broken on arrival, so I returned it and stuck with my original HP Deskjet for two more years until it finally broke.

In 2018, I thought that, given my HP Deskjet had lasted ten years, I should buy a newer model of HP Deskjet and have a similar experience. I didn't realise the horrible mistake I'd made until after the return window, so I was then stuck with a printer that had been shat out of Satan's arse crack for the next six years.

Whenever I used that printer, it was always slightly broken in a different way depending on the machine from which I was trying to print. On Windows, it usually misread the ink levels and printed out pages in a monochrome version of red, blue, or magenta until I recalibrated the printer. On macOS, it couldn't tell that the paper was loaded unless I restarted the printer between jobs. On Linux, it kept asking me to realign the print heads for literally no reason, and couldn't work the scanner unless I connected over USB.

I could only print reliably when I used an iPhone or iPad to send the job, or when I used the photocopy button on the printer itself, at which point I'd usually discover that the toner cartridges weren't working anymore, and shaking them rarely fixed it, so I'd then have to order new inkjet cartridges that were always more expensive than they were the previous time, and then wait for them to arrive before I could continue. Cheaper aftermarket ink cartridges didn't work, so I'm fairly sure that HP was blocking them at firmware level.

After five years of hellish torment, I bought a Brother DS-640 photo and document scanner, and was pleasantly surprised by how reliably it worked. I just plugged in the USB cable, the operating system immediately understood it was a scanner, and it did what I asked it to. The supplemental software was actually useful, and didn't just duplicate what the operating system was already doing less well. That was a pleasant surprise, given that I thought home printers and scanners had just become universally terrible.

It took a further year for me to finally get around to it, but this week I finally bit the bullet and bought my first modern black-and-white laser printer. I opted for the Brother HL-L2400WE, partly because it's cheap in Argos, but mostly because it was recommended in a hilarious Verge article that pointed out that this was an example of a printer that doesn't completely suck donkey balls.

Setting it up was a quick, straightforward, and pleasant experience. It feels well-built, can do double-sided printing without breaking itself, and processes half a dozen pages in a fraction of the time it took my HP inkjet to process one. So overall, I'd call it a 1000% improvement. I will enjoy hammer throwing my terrible old HP Deskjet into a skip at my local household recycling centre.

The only real downside as far as I can tell is that I've lost colour printing, but given how infrequently I use that functionality, I think the trade-off was worth it. I even signed up for their "eco print" subscription, because £24 a year to automatically replace my toner cartridges is still several times cheaper than what I was paying HP every time their inkjet cartridges decided not to work because I'd apparently left it too long since I last printed something.

And yes, I did find it find it darkly hilarious when I heard that the HP CEO wants to turn his company's terrible home printers into a subscription. I think it's safe to say that I will not be partaking in that service!

Vexed About Advocacy

Yesterday when I sat down to write this part of the blog post, I was amused to see someone in my Bluesky feed asking a technical support question and hilariously adding "DO NOT FUCKING TELL ME TO INSTALL LINUX" at the bottom of each post in their thread.

In their defence, they do raise an interesting point. Linux is a great choice as a home desktop operating system, and one that I've enjoyed, and made a career out of, for the better part of two decades. However, I've also observed that it can have a high barrier of entry for non-techies and take time for someone to migrate to user-respecting tools before they can make that jump. And even after they've made that jump, home users still have to interact with a world where 96% of people aren't running Linux on their workstations. I keep a foot in both camps for that reason myself.

In my view, telling the average home user that's run into a technical problem with Windows, or macOS, to install Linux instead is like slowly driving past a stranger whose car has broken down on the motorway and yelling through an open window that they should buy a better car. Funnily enough, those comments usually go unappreciated by the person who's currently stood at the side of the road next to a Nissan Micra with its bonnet open and smoke billowing out of the engine! They're often much more interested in hearing Green Flag's diagnosis of the problem than listening to a passing stranger describe at length how amazing they feel when they're driving a BMW 3 series.

As a solution, it also reminds me of the Jason Mendoza character in a TV Show called "The Good Place", who told the group that he'd solved many of his life's problems by throwing a molotov cocktail at them, because it destroyed the original problem and replaced it with a different one. Nuking Windows and paving over it with Linux because a headset microphone isn't being detected properly is a molotov cocktail solution for that problem.

I can understand that many Linux enthusiasts' hearts are in the right place, so from their point of view they're having a good experience and want to share it with others, but when someone's not bought into the libre software ideology yet and they just want to fix a problem on their computer, it can feel to them like there's a swarm of unhelpful strangers popping up in their mentions to brag about how brilliant their own setup is and browbeat them into making an entirely unrelated technical choice.

Choosing not to respond when we have nothing new or helpful to suggest is an option! People are also allowed to vent about things that frustrate them. As someone that writes enterprise Linux user documentation and online tutorials for a living, these are things that I try to remind myself when using Mastodon, because it's very easy for me to over-explain a solution that may not have been solicited in the first place.