• 14 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • It is certainly useful for some use cases such as network print servers (I have a dedicated lxc container on the network to do this) and custom conversions of pages (during my digging, I learned about companies using a CUPS network printer to watermark every document being printed).

    I’m not an expert by any means: it is definitely a useful tool in certain cases, but oh man… the documentation was a bit hard to figure out for me!


  • Mission Accomplished! My printer driver now has a MirrorPrint Option, and selecting it enables Mirror Printing. For convenience (since I don’t see a client side option to flip mirror printing), I have a doppleganger of my regular printer, and I named it MirrorTest - screenshot below. When I need a mirror print, I just send it to the mirror printer.

    Actual Changes

    Here’s the relevant excerpt (added) in /etc/cups/ppd/MirrorTest.ppd (I added this UI option right below the Toner option). Excerpt adds a MirrorPrint Toggle (boolean) to the printer defaults setup. When enabled - the printer will print in mirror mode.

    *%=== Mirror Printing ================================
    *OpenGroup: General
    *OpenUI *MirrorPrint/Mirror Print: Boolean
    *OrderDependency: 110 AnySetup *MirrorPrint
    *DefaultMirrorPrint: True
    *MirrorPrint True/MirrorPrint: "<>setpagedevice"
    *MirrorPrint False/Normal: ""
    *CloseUI: *MirrorPrint
    

    For further convenience (making sure that a new printer installation didn’t mess up my custom changes, I also updated the relevant ppd file in /usr/share/cups/model/. Whenever you add a new printer - CUPS will use the corresponding model ppd as a base, and it will apply any settings changes from configuring default to the copied ppd file in /etc/cups/ppd/your_printer.ppd.

    Hope this helps if someone else is also looking to do something similar!







  • You’re fine.

    Most distributions/derivative distributions are fine for very long periods.

    It’s just that when the base distribution itself (Debian, Fedora in your case, Opensuse, etc) are themselves nicely customized out of the box to address user concerns, that’s a very attractive prospect to long time users like myself.

    Debian has a lot of history and stability, so if I can use it for myself, family, friends without an additional layer or more of other parties, that’s very appealing.


  • I have Nixos on a laptop, and have a love//hate relationship with it.

    I love the customizability and declarative setup.

    I hate the number of times I’ve sunk down rabbitholes trying to set specific things up on it.

    The updates being done via switch are a bit inconvenient, but cool enough.

    The fact that I can’t customize everything, particularly on kde, is slightly sad.

    All in all, I really like it, but wouldn’t recommend it for my less technical friends, who I’d normally install Ubuntu for. This has gone up my list, close to Opensuse slowroll and Linux mint Debian edition now.




  • That’s not right. Debian/suse are no less out of the box user friendly than Arch - not counting endeavouros/Manjaro, they’re more friendly.

    Arch still needs extra setup and configuration after install. Endeavouros makes it a bit simpler, but there’s still configuration (and ricing) invoice. Auto-discovery of printers (cups, avahi), graphical configuration tools out of the box, user permissions/group membership setup out of the box in a way that new users (or even power users) can just set things up graphically… all of that needs extra work.

    That’s the extra configuration that this is providing.