Sunday, April 15, 2018

You Just Bought Our Printer? We’re Sorry!

I know that most people are mouth breathing morons who probably can’t figure out how to find the system settings for their i-phones, but it really chaps my ass that HP doesn’t at least politely tip their hat to a Linux user who just bought their fucking ink guzzling money sucker.

Just so you know, I’ve had a Canon printer for about 5 years or so. It had been ailing for a while, but it became extremely dysfunctional earlier today when I needed to finish up my taxes. Fed up, I packed up the dog in the ol’ Plymouth and headed to Wally World. After starring at the 15 or so printers for way too long, I finally picked up the $50 HP Officejet 4652 and headed to Burger King for a stress relieving artery clogger. Grace had a couple of cheeseburgers too.

Now just so you know, you can get just about every HP printer out there to work with Linux. (I’m a Linux user by the way. It’s no big deal really; I just prefer it to Windows.) The thing is that during the setup process they have you go to their website where they immediately SHIT ON YOU for buying their printer rather than saying, “Thanks for choosing HP! We see you’re using Linux. Head on over to our Officially Unsupported HPLIP page to get you started on a path to paying us hundreds of dollars for milliliters of ink!”

Let’s be clear about this. Linux: It’s just another fucking operating system. It’s modern and fairly standardised these days. There’s really no good reason not to be civil and provide a modicum of support. After all, I just gave you $50 for a some plastic. If you want to see anymore money out of me, the damn thing had better “just work”TM.

You know, over the years I’ve owned several printers. Tandy, Epson, Canon, HP… Generally speaking HP’s have been the best… Although that Tandy was a beast. Epson print heads clog and make the device useless, and Canon… Well Canon’s pretty good too, but three out of the five HP printers I’ve owned were amazing. (I had one dud.) Let’s hope this new one doesn’t make me rant any further.

Oh, final note on HP with Linux: Installing the latest version of HPLIP from their website is painfully slow. HP software is just as shitty on Linux as it is on Windows. It’s sits in the background stealing your CPU Cycles and “phoning home” way too often, but the printer works well, and the print quality is excellent.

Pax,

-f2x

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