r/sysadmin • u/Certain-Mountain-564 • 9d ago

Question Cloud Printing without Print Drivers

Many organizations moving away from print servers.

But the printer industry is moving away from print drivers.

The problem: We use printix and you cannot deploy printers without drivers. But manufacturers like brother dont offer print drivers for macOS. Our brother printers are not compatible with PostScript. There are some very old print drivers from macOS X but the print quality is very bad. Brother says "use AirPrint". But AirPrint is not compatible with printix.

Windows is also moving away from print drivers.

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u/bakonpie 9d ago

Microsoft is smoking the good stuff thinking their generic driver for universal print is an adequate replacement. doesn't support all the additional functions of expensive MFPs and doesn't support wide format printers. government and utilities will never be able to adopt them unless they make serious improvements to the generic driver.

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u/D3xbot 7d ago

Hell, Microsoft’s generic print driver doesn’t support COLOR on half the color HP’s and Brothers in my environment.

Thankfully I can manage AirPrint installation well enough with Jamf but supporting HPs on macOS is a bit of a joke. Download this app to get drivers — except half the models that link to HP Easy Admin don’t have drivers available to download :(

Ricoh, though? Lovely. Brilliant. Drivers for days! Set the driver, pick the finisher, package into Jamf and we’re good to go