I could never get the scanner to work on that cannon printer. For printing, I couldn’t get the paper size to work at all. My PDF paper size was A4, my phisical paper was A4, my printer was set to print on A4, but it still the footer was truncated from the page.
so I wonder, Linux friends, fellow enjoyers of hardware sold to the public, what do they know that we don’t know?
Oh, you know it, you just don’t want it to be true. Every business out there knows it too. The age of consumerism driven growth is gone, killed by the ever growing financial gaps between the layers of society in all western world. There is no point in playing nice to attract customers if they can’t pay, so businesses are stealing from the poor (mostly data in the case of MS) and selling only to the rich (higher valuation). The products that are marketed are not the products that are needed for the companies to make money off of.
This shift might not be as visible with IT companies, but look at more obvious examples: even fucking McDonald’s has stopped going after customers needing affordable meals and is going after fewer but richer customers. So do hotels. So do airlines. And yes, so do IT companies.
In the case of Microsoft, they have a lot of experience with fucking over low end consumers and then bouncing back too. They were the most hated company in the 2000s and pivoted to one of the good guys by the end of 2010s. They know they can afford to alienate customers for long periods of time with no lasting issues
once to scan a multipage document that wasn’t scanning right in Linux, and once to print a photo for my kids
This was shockingly bad last time I needed to do it (years ago) and only had access to Linux devices. I now use my phone for scanning and printing and I’ve given up on trying to figure it out on my Linux machines.
I love that there’s a big jump in adoption for Linux, but I feel it is still stuck in the “hobbyist” space, more suited to people who love to thinker with everything.
There would be wider / faster adoption if there would be some desktop environment with coherent user experience available, but this is the hardest problem to solve and unfortunately one people don’t really want to pay for so I doubt we will have it in the near future
Or, hear me out, they’re doing it to justify their continuous employment.
We could have stopped developing almost every piece of popular software in 2018 or so and the world would have been a better place, but imagine putting YouTube or whatever, Slack, Reddit, etc in maintenance mode a decade ago and only investing in scalability and stability. Wouldn’t the world be a better place?
But that would mean that a lot of people would be out of a job, entire departments really, so they’re doing crap to justify their existence