After 3 successful Opportunity Open Source conferences we will celebrate the 4th one, in the
Indian Institute for Information Technology (IIIT) Allahabad, in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, India!
It will take place on August 28-30, 2026!
The Call for Proposals is open until July, 3, see link below.
https://openprinting.github.io/OpenPrinting-News-Opportunity-Open-Source-4.0/
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7467709764303757312/
@leo @keen456 Printer Applications are not restricted to Snaps. The first ready-to-install binary packages of them are indeed Snaps, but this is because Snap allows for distro-independent packaging system software and daemons, in contrary to Flatpak and AppImage, and also Ubuntu, which supports Snap best is a very widespread distro.
Generally, you can package Printer Applications in other formats, we work also on OCI containers (Docker, cloud-native, ...), or just DEB or RPM ...
Yes, these bridges are the Printer Applications, software emulations of driverless IPP printers which talk with the non-driverless printer hardware on their other end. They replace classic printer drivers and PPD files.
CUPS will stop supporting classic drivers and PPD files from 3.x on.
So the recommended architecture for printer drivers is the Printer Application.
@keen456 I have also sent a longer e-mail to the lead of the KDE Linux project, Nate Graham, to discuss the best way of how to handle printer drivers in the distro.
I have also invited Nate to join the Matrix chat group of printing support in KDE and he did.
@keen456 Thanks for the ping. I went there now and have posted a longer reply, giving some background and answering the questions of several commenters.
Here is another testimonial of my work at OpenPrinting!
Nick from @thelinuxexperiment
has posted a video about the desktop software he uses for his day-to-day tasks on his Linux machine and at 19:24 min he tells how easy it was to use his HP multi-function printer on Linux with the KDE desktop and that, despite he considers printers "terrible", they always worked for him under Linux, while under Windows it was a nightmare.
@sjvn a gallon of gas is getting more expensive than a gallon of printer ink ...
@tuxfanmatze Thank you very much!
Nirav Patel, founder and CEO of @frameworkcomputer told this in his live presentation of the new Framework products (esp. the new Framework 13 Pro) yesterday.
Till Kamppeter