I've had it up to here with cups! An alternative would be welcome.

[hazel]

I've recently been tearing my hair out (metaphorically) on account of a buggy interaction between cups and the gimp. It's fixed now thanks to quick work by one of the Crux developers, but it made me realise how much I hate cups.

Usually when this sort of thing happens, I read some literature and can work out what went wrong. Even if it's something I can't fix by myself, at least I feel I have learned something. But I still have no idea how cups works and I find the online help completely impenetrable.

Cups is vast and complex. It may be a wonderful printing program for a big office with two or three networked printers, but for a home computer with one local printer plugged into lp0, it's overkill. Talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut! And what is it doing in Crux? Crux is supposed to be about simplicity.

Has anybody here used lprng? I visited their site a couple of days ago and it looks nice and small. But does it work with things like OOo and the gimp? What other alternatives are there?

[oz]

Debian has a wiki page on CUPS and a few system printing alternatives, but CUPS has pretty much taken the lead over the last few years with the alternatives being used far less often. I ran LPR a number of years ago, but haven't touched it since CUPS first came about.

[hazel]

CUPS has pretty much taken the lead over the last few years with the alternatives being used far less often. I ran LPR a number of years ago, but haven't touched it since CUPS first came about.

That's precisely the problem. Cups has become for Linux printing what Windows is to PCs: the default installation. I can't think of any other Linux application field where one single candidate has taken over like this. Whatever happened to choice?

I have a psychological problem in having software that I can't understand on my machine. It makes me feel helpless and stupid. And with cups, I can't even understand the documentation!

I've found something called pdq which looks about the simplest thing there could be: it doesn't even have a spooler daemon. I'm beginning to think it might be worth installing it in Crux and trying it out. After all, I'll still have cups in Debian.