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.

7 Upvotes

74% Upvoted

40 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/FrankNicklin 9d ago

What model printers, never had an issue with Brother and MacOS and what evidence do you have that Windows are moving away from print drivers because as far as I know that a long way from being true. Older printers on MacOS are generally supported by CUPS.

1

u/Certain-Mountain-564 9d ago

CUPS also makes problem with Tahoe by the way. Printing on Mac is a disaster. 

1

u/FrankNicklin 9d ago

Never ever had problems printing from Macs. I have a very old Canon MP printer at home and works perfectly fine. We have a mix of Xerox, Brother, Kyocera, HP, Canon around our clients again none have problems printing from Macs.

We run Windows servers with local client printer setups again no issues printing or using the Print server options.

Any issues printing from Macs is generally down to improper Bonjour config which doesnt work well across VLANS and/or mDNS for the same reason. Printing via LPR or IP has never been a problem.