Gutenprint Discontinues macOS Support
(gimp-print.sourceforge.io)35 points by soraminazuki 13 hours ago
35 points by soraminazuki 13 hours ago
For context the guy who made Gutenprint (and CUPS) deprecated the PPD driver API in CUPS and it doesn’t support them anymore.
https://github.com/apple/cups/issues/5271
So I assume thats why there’s no maintainers, and probably will never be.
> As of July 7, 2024 the Gutenprint project has formally deprecated MacOS support. This means that no further MacOS-compatible binaries will be produced.
Does macOS not already have their own printer drivers? Why would someone install gimp-print on their MacBook?
There have been cases where I needed to install drivers from the manufacturer. Hunting it down from the manufacturer's website is a pain and most importantly, I'd rather avoid installing CrapPrinterBundle.exe [1] from hardware manufacturers if I could avoid it. Gutenprint has been a good alternative in this case.
Yes. Even better, you also get officially supported drivers from the manufacturer.
Sometimes you need them to fully utilize the printer, like my Canon Pixma Pro-100.
Please don't post snarky comments like this on HN.
Not the only problems with printing on modern Mac OS. I recently had to install little linux print servers at many locations due to Apple's Sequoia 15 dropping support for any sort of printing over USB to the ubiquitous and still better than most HP Deskjets used in many offices.
Only if printers didn't keep getting progressively worse. All I want is a printer that can instantly print after I power it on, prints nicely with cheap ink, doesn't connect to the internet, and supports driverless printing.
> Does anybody know how many active projects are still left there?
https://sourceforge.net/directory/ shows hundreds of thousands, but I can’t see a good way to filter out inactive projects.
> And who wound up owning them after Slashdot?
https://sourceforge.net/about/leadership appears to indicate that it’s still associated with Slashdot Media. I remember when they were bought that the new owner spent quite a bit of time regaining the trust of the software community. No idea how healthy the company’s business or operations are now, but it’s impressive that they’ve survived this long.
I don’t really know what their USP is anymore. It might be fun to start a new project there just to see what it’s like now.
There's a fair number of active projects on SourceForge - a couple of names you might recognize are DOSBox, GParted, and qBittorrent - but what pretty much all of them have in common is that they're old. To a first approximation, no one's launching new projects on SourceForge; projects use it out of inertia, not because it's good.
From the looks of that FAQ, macOS support for the project was effectively abandoned long ago. The most recent looking FAQ entries reference Mac OS 10.5, which was released in 2007. Declaring it "formally deprecated" now is - well, a formality.
(Is Gutenprint even relevant anymore? I don't know a lot about professional printing - if you know more than I do, how outdated does the printer list at https://gimp-print.sourceforge.io/p_Supported_Printers.php look?)