My brother printer "just works" on Ubuntu...

C

CrazedNerd

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Weird, i have this printer for work that i use sometimes, the LC3030...and i was thinking I would have to go through this 10-30 minute long driver installation process, but i just plugged it into to my AMD motherboard and it was recognized and printed a document without any extra effort

:oops:

Why?
 


A printer is just a piece of hardware. You plugged it into your USB port, Linux recognized the hardware id and enabled the driver. Brother is pretty well supported by Linux. Pretty cool, right?

I'm not quite so lucky with my Canon MX472. But it's a minor issue for me, that the default paper type is set to 4x6 photo paper. I have to reset the default to Letter before it'll work.
 
I just know that certain chipsets don't need drivers for linux, while practically everything needs a driver for windows, i guess when linux hardware doesn't need a driver, the OS already had it installed...since everything computer related needs some sort of kernel.
 
I think you mean many chipsets are natively supported by the kernel, because the firmware/driver is part of the kernel package. I think there is no such thing as a device that doesn't need a driver to function, in any OS. Windows also includes many common drivers, and those devices "just work".

Many different products share the same base chipset, but might require their specific driver software to "unlock" their device's functionality (because, jerks). Those drivers often include added bloat in Windows. Linux just worries about the base chipset without all the bloat.

But, the Linux ecosphere isn't perfect. We lag behind with newer hardware, due to slow manufacturer support, or no support at all, which requires the most awesome of the Linux community to reverse-engineer the drivers.
 
I just know that certain chipsets don't need drivers for linux,

It does need drivers still. They're just in the kernel. This is similar to how Windows can use some hardware without adding third party drivers. You're still using drivers - you just didn't have to deal with adding them.

Similarly, Intel GPU chipsets... (And tons of other software.) The kernel is millions of lines of code and a giant chunk of that is built in drivers - probably because someone always yells when you remove drivers for old hardware. Someone's always still using that hardware.
 
I think you mean many chipsets are natively supported by the kernel, because the firmware/driver is part of the kernel package. I

I shoulda hit refresh first. ^ what he said
 
But, the Linux ecosphere isn't perfect. We lag behind with newer hardware, due to slow manufacturer support, or no support at all, which requires the most awesome of the Linux community to reverse-engineer the drivers.
Yeah i know, I started playing with linux 5 years ago, and one day Ubuntu just would not load the desktop because of driver issues, and i switched back to windows only (i was also irritated because windows partioning didn't recognize linux...), and then years later i decided to just stick with mostly linux in part because windows 10 wouldn't actually let me change my default browser to mozilla when i was learning HTML...they make you think you can, but it just switched right back to internet explorer after you leave the screen for obvious reasons...and another series of windows issues (i've been using windows for a VERY long time), led me to conclude that every computer system had problems and i should just switch to linux for fun because it's open source and is geared towards people who want to learn anyways.
 
Yep, it was a rocky start for me as well, early 2000's, but it also presented a playground for me; a new world to explore. So I endured and learned from my mistakes, and reinstalling the OS many times. And often, doing with Linux things that I could not do in Windows.

Knoppix was one of the early live distros, and I got very familiar with it's tools for data recovery and network management while working IT at my previous job. Windows' ability to fix it's own filesystems was renown for being crappy. And when the Windows registry corrupted ... fuggitaboutit. I ran both Windows and Linux servers. Enjoyed working in Linux more. My desktop was Fedora with Compiz cube; gah, all that flippy-floppy liquid animation would drive me buggy today. Ran Windows as a VMWare client.
 

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