Just one more thing that 'Grinds My Gears'. I'm still using Mint 17.3 as my main OS, because for the most part, it works. I've found through experience, when crucial stuff stops working in Linux, it's invariably down to Linux Developers and their piss-poor/non-existent Beta-testing of new kernel releases. And when they break shit, it more often than not stays broken! The two examples near & dear to my heart are 1) the kernel 'regression' that caused my Transcend SSD to no longer be detected, and 2) the one that rendered my Canon scanner useless. One moment everything works fine, update kernel, and stuff gets broken for good.
I'm sure I've mentioned it already, but their way around introduced-bugs like these is simply to 'wait them out'. They acknowledge they exist, sure, but if there's not enough of a public outcry, they're just ignored until enough time has elapsed, that the bug-reports can be quietly marked as 'Closed'.
And I get it, tracking down each & every little bug would be an impossible task. But that doesn't change the fact that the older your computer & peripherals, the greater the chance that each & every kernel upgrade can potentially 'brick' your system. This was certainly the case with my Transcend SSD - every kernel that succeeded 3.0.19-32 could no longer detect & boot from the SSD. But what happens when it's not a hardware-driver issue, but an entire subset of the computer experience that's being neglected - in this case, Printers & printing.
Network-printing worked fine for me on Mint 17.3 for years. Unfortunately, since the 17.3 repositories are now offline, I can no longer add new network printers to my laptop, as part of the setup procedure includes downloading the appropriate printer-driver from the net. On discovering this yesterday, I decided to boot up my Mint 19.1 installation, which doesn't go EOL till 2023.
But what used to be a 2 minute job with 17.3, I spent more than an hour trying to do - or, 'fix' rather. Printing on Mint 19.1 seems a complete shambles. Nothing seems to work properly. When I try adding a new network-printer by doing a search for it, nothing is found, using either the network-printer or the Samba-printer options. With the network-printer option, the network computer hosting the printer 'pings' fine, yet I'm told that there's no computer detected. The Samba-printer option's search is equally clueless. Including the entire SMB path to the printer will detect it instantly however. The next hurdle you encounter involves permissions. Once the network printer is detected, you are prompted for your username & password, which it accepts, no problem. However in order to proceed, I need to 'Set authentication details now', using the exact same username & password that I've just entered - not a problem in itself - what is a problem is that the same bloody username/password combo is now not accepted!
Nevertheless, it will allow you to proceed, though you are then prompted for a username/password every time you want to print a document. What's irritating as hell about this is, when the username/password prompt box appears, it includes a tick-box to remember these login details - but it doesn't work either.
Although I think what annoys me the most about all of this is the 'New Printer' dialog itself (see pic). Notice the way the 'Password' field is placed above the 'Username' field! Show me an OS, a Linux distro or even a web-page that requires the user to login, that puts the password before the username!!! They don't exist, or at least I've never come across one. But the lazy shit that coded this thought it perfectly fine. This is a perfect example of someone who DOESN'T use Linux as their main OS. Or use printers for that matter. Printers are still an integral part of computer systems yet this shoddy, slap-shod, buggy implementation is deemed acceptable?!?!?!?
It just makes me sad.
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