The image looks surprisingly happy at that news
Windows printing is already a mess and a pain. Look to pre Windows 7, an easy standard print dialog.
A dialogue box where it’s obvious what you can click on, all the information you need is clearly displayed, and all the keyboard shortcuts are visible? Some UX designer at Microsoft will be having a fit. Better convert that all to React and hide most of it behind a hamburger menu at once; this isn’t how things are done in Windows any more.
I still miss the XP Control Panel. We didn’t know how good we had it
Ah. I miss that good ui. Such a good ui. There’s a reason it’s still around on all the utility backend and admin stuffs.
Microslop gonna Microslop
So printers which never worked will stop working? Ok 🤷
It would be news if Microsoft would add printer support to windows for once.
Wrong, old printers are the only ones that were built to last and are easier to maintain.
Yeah. I got a free HP Laserjet 4 a few years back. 4 pages per minute, smelly (ozone, I think), curled pages like crazy, was fucking huge, no duplex or networking. Actually, if I remember correctly it was parallel only, no USB. Completely repairable though.
Now, for my B/W printing (I also have a Brother color laser, and an Epson A3 inkjet because reasons) I have a tiny Brother laser, that prints something like 16 PPM, duplex, with dirt cheap compatible cartridges. Go ahead and get a LJ4.
I imagine that if you have some obscure specialized printer this may be a problem, though.
It’s hard to hear what Microsoft is saying over the sound of my 15 year-old printers running on CUPS.
Just a heads up some of those old drivers are just encapsulated perl scripts with root access. Easy network target for bad actors.
Interesting. I wonder if it’d be practical to containerize them by default.
Oh my god please don’t make me have to debug docker or k8s printer drivers
They seem to be contracting on all fronts except their datacenters. With a little luck, Micros**t will die out with a huge bang in a few years. The world will instantly become a better place for everyone…
Instantly?
Hospitals, telecoms, schools, universities, research labs the world over would be left without security updates or tech support. Businesses would crash out, access to everything from Sharepoint to Outlook to Entra ID SSO cut off rendering tens of millions unable to work and likely furloughed or redundant.
Enjoy your accelerationist fantasies if you like, daring to assume that the void would be filled by fucking Linux Mint or something and not literally just Apple. But the idea that it would be instant is even more unhinged than the average .ml stammering about the misunderstood virtues of Russian anti-Imperialism.
Hopefully be a massive teachable moment to humanity?
