Linux printing finally stopped being a nightmare, and Windows is only now catching up

Published Sep 29, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path. Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals. As far as computers go, we've effectively mastered the art of getting text and images to display on a screen. Getting those same words and images to enter the real world via a printer is much, much harder than it needs to be. Printing has always been the punchline for Linux specifically, because installing vendor packages and drivers, if they even exist, is just one big dice roll. If they work, who knows how long it'll last? For a modern network printer these days, though, printing on Linux is now about as close to zero effort as it gets, and Windows is only now rebuilding its print stack to work the same way. Driverless printing is now the standard It's not the workaround anymore These days, driverless printing is not only possible, but in a lot of cases, it's the default mode, and it's just part of how a printer announces itself on a network. A modern network printer announces itself on your local network using multicast DNS and DNS Service Discovery, which happens to be the same zero-configuration approach Apple markets as Bonjour. CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System), the print system behind nearly every desktop Linux distro, picks up that announcement the same way, and then it's able to ask the printer over the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) what it supports. This is things like paper sizes, duplexing, color modes, document formats, and more. Once the job is sent, it's done so in a PDF or standardized raster that the printer already understands, which eliminates the need for model-specific code. This process goes by several names—IPP Everywhere, AirPrint for Apple devices, Mopria for Android and Windows, and all of them overlap quite heavily. The good news is, if the printer shows any kind of indication that it supports those, its chances of working on Linux are very good. Your system will still convert documents into the format that the printer will accept, but it's using generic filters that are included in every distro, not brand-specific filters. The printer now carries the burden Your distro doesn't matter With the old way of printing, the vendor driver has to match a specific distro, architecture, and print system version, and each of those can break on an update. When the printer describes its own capabilities, a CUPS update can't strand it, because nothing model-specific can fall out of sync. Print dialogs can even list a discovered driverless printer before you've created a queue, because CUPS can build one on demand, so there's virtually no setup on your end. Arch-based distros are a bit of an exception, depending on which one you're on. On CachyOS, my Linux daily driver, the printing stack isn't guaranteed to be ready on a fresh install. Some users have found no printer settings at all until they installed CUPS and a print manager themselves, and network discovery can also depend on Avahi and mDNS, which does throw a small wrench into things. Windows is following suit It's rebuilding its printing stack the same way Microsoft reached a similar conclusion with printing recently, and it's definitely better late than never. Windows 10 version 21H2 added an inbox IPP class driver for Mopria printers, and Microsoft has been winding down legacy drivers since. As of January 15, 2026, new printer drivers for Windows 11 are signed only on a case by case basis, meaning they're for specific printers that probably need drivers to function. From July 2027, third-party driver updates through Windows Update will be limited to security fixes, and vendor extras are slowly being moved to the Microsoft Store. Windows is in a pretty good spot today, but it's still mid-integration. Linux, by contrast, has largely finished the migration for modern printers many years ago at this point. Older printers still work better on Windows Linux can be a bit messy with legacy stuff The upcoming CUPS 3.0 drops PPD files entirely, and with them the classic driver model that non-IPP printers depend on. Those drivers are being repackaged as OpenPrinting's Printer Applications. However, like many drivers in the Linux world, packaging is uneven based on distro and version. Some users have already lost working FreeBSD setups when deprecated pieces changed before replacements reached their repos, which is definitely suboptimal. Windows, meanwhile, is going easy on existing hardware. Microsoft says legacy drivers can still be installed, and only the opt-in Windows Protected Print Mode removes them. If you own a host-based laser that doesn't speak IPP, Windows is still the easier OS to work with because of these legacy features. Additionally, vendor extras like ink dashboards and alignment tools also usually have Windows apps and no Linux equivalent. Look for the logo, not driver support If your printer is from the last decade and connects to your network, Linux is probably the OS with the least printing friction you can use right now. 15 years ago, that sentence would've been a joke, but now it's reality. When you shop for your next printer, skip the Linux driver search and look for the AirPrint, Mopria, or IPP Everywhere logo. It'll work on Linux today, and it's what Windows will expect going forward.