Linux Is not a Viable OS without robust and extensive printer driver support.

Hi sorry to report this as a bug - but I don't know any other way this it has any chance of ever being resolved.

Firstly let me say that this is not a typical n00b rant - I have been a Linux user at home for 6+ years and am well aware of all of the familiar arguments concerning the need to apply pressure on manufacturers to provide appropriate support, about the fact that it is very difficult to make any progress without that support and so on, as well as the generally eternally optimistic hope that somehow some day this situation improve of it's own accord.

However after 6 plus years of hearing the same message - and with virtually no movement on behalf of any of the major manufactures - and despite an extremely supportive and vocal user base, it seems clear that this issue has now become a major and potentially insurmountable obstacle in preventing the wide scale adoption of Linux on the desktop overall.

To explain a little about my own circumstances - for several years I have worked for myself running a small telecommunications business - which essentially involves traveling around the UK and Europe and selling cut price telecommunications services to the travel and tourism industry.

In any case, I always resisted installing Linux on my laptop, as there were too many hurdles towards doing so; predominantly that managing contacts and compatibility between different platforms was not always a simple affair. However due to advances in other areas within the Linux platform this situation has been considerably eased.

Nevertheless one major factor remains outstanding in preventing me from adopting Linux as my full time mobile/portable operating system and that is printer support. One of the aspects of my job involves traveling and meeting people in a diverse range of office type environments, with an almost equally diverse range of printers and printing equipment. In the past resolving incompatibility's between printing equipment and the various laptops I have owned was largely inconsequential, as drivers for the 'rival' operating system I was using at that time were readily available - and for good measure I always made sure I had the most common drivers installed for the brands of printers I encountered the most. (Indeed I can't recall having done this a single time where I ever really ran into any significant difficulty in this regard).

However I always had philosophical issues with the necessity involved in using a proprietary operating system for the work that I do - and leaving the office and using Linux as my home based operating system of choice. So recently (and inspired by the purchase of a nice new fast laptop), I decided to see if it was either possible, or practical to ditch MS entirely.

However after installing Kubuntu 'edgy' 6.10, it has become abundantly clear that this is indeed not possible at all. I say this in light of the experience of 3 days trying (and failing) to set up a network printer (which is a Lexmark X1800) 'All in One' type combination of scanner, photocopier and printer - of exactly the kind that it is not uncommon for me to encounter in small office environments.

The reason this is significant is that despite early aspirations at the beginning of the 1990's that one day we would all live in a 'paperless society', the reality is that for legal and many other reasons the vast majority of formal contractual and business type communications are still conducted on paper. If I meet a client and we make an agreement, that agreement invariably must be concluded on paper.

I am aware also that my own personal experience in this regard is far from unique, as from the smallest of office environments, to the largest of corporate and multi-national conglomerate businesses, all business of any true and binding significance is still conducted on paper.

This is significant for Linux also, in that without the large scale adoption of Linux in the office and working environment, the hopes of a great many Linux advocates everywhere that one day Linux may supplant Microsoft as the dominant operating system of choice in the market at large, would seem to be a potentially forlorn, misplaced and unrealistic aspiration.

It is significant too in the sense that unless Linux is adopted in a whole sale manner within these environments, then Linux as a desktop operating system may always be restricted to being used by nothing more than a relatively few home based enthusiasts. It must be pointed out perhaps that Microsoft conquered the work place before conquering the world - and that computing originated in the work place and migrated to the home when people became familiar and comfortable using the tools they had.

If after 6 years of using Linux, even I can still struggle (and fail) to get a basic printer configuration going, how is it reasonable to expect an averagely skilled office worker to quickly and efficient configure their laptops for fast printer and scanner access? No company in their right mind could afford to allocate this kind of time to their workers - and no worker in this environment should be expected to waste this kind of time, attempting to do what in 2006 should be the most basic of all possible tasks, which is simply to print out important documents and communications for their employers.

There has been an assumption to date that 'if we build it, they will come', with regard to Linux printer driver support. However even though many of the main prerequisites are now in place, manufacturer support for printers has made very little progress whatsoever, nor is there any indication that this will change at any point in the foreseeable future.

Unless somehow this situation is resolved and is given the highest possible priority (perhaps through some project to provide a virtualised driver 'compatibility layer' of some kind), then it seems clear that the objective of wide scale Linux adoption may already be over before it has really had a chance to succeed.

Again I know all of the old arguments about such things being out of developer's control etc - and I also know that some people are unrealistically optimistic and vocal about these matters. However the cold stark reality is that this situation has not improved, nor is it likely as initially hoped that it might eventually resolve itself.