Printing in Linux is a land mine. And there really is no reason for it. HP has probably contributed more lines of code to CUPS than anyone else. And many of their printers are the worst compatability wise. So it is really hit or miss. But with the average home printer costing under $100, its hard to not say, just buy a new printer.
Now for a true counter point to the original article. I switched my home desktop to Ubuntu on a lark about 3 weeks ago. I had such great success in making it work, I immediately switched my SuSe laptop I use at work to Ubuntu. With the exception of the 915 resolution driver (and why is this not on the install CD!?!?!) everything installed perfectly. No hardware incompatabilities once the optional repositories were enabled.
One of the problems we have been constantly having is connecting to our corporate printers. SuSe keeps loosing the connection, and needs to be re-setup every few days. Fedora, well forget about it. But Ubuntu, connected to the AD, found the printer, and was printing pages in 5 minutes. We have some Windows desktops that were not that easy to set up.
For me, once I downloaded the ppd from linuxprinting.org, printer setup was EXTREMELY easy.
The original article was pretty much dead on on everything else. Though it did miss one element that really sucks in Ubuntu... Japanese language input. They had it working well in Dapper from what I understand, but that was not the case in Edgy.
Now for a true counter point to the original article. I switched my home desktop to Ubuntu on a lark about 3 weeks ago. I had such great success in making it work, I immediately switched my SuSe laptop I use at work to Ubuntu. With the exception of the 915 resolution driver (and why is this not on the install CD!?!?!) everything installed perfectly. No hardware incompatabilities once the optional repositories were enabled.
One of the problems we have been constantly having is connecting to our corporate printers. SuSe keeps loosing the connection, and needs to be re-setup every few days. Fedora, well forget about it. But Ubuntu, connected to the AD, found the printer, and was printing pages in 5 minutes. We have some Windows desktops that were not that easy to set up.
For me, once I downloaded the ppd from linuxprinting.org, printer setup was EXTREMELY easy.
The original article was pretty much dead on on everything else. Though it did miss one element that really sucks in Ubuntu... Japanese language input. They had it working well in Dapper from what I understand, but that was not the case in Edgy.