Printers are known in IT to be a utter pain in the ass. Most brands are also using a lot of proprietary stuff and it limits interoperability. Drivers for example.

Well known example is about ink cartridges. HP added identification chips on them, so if you want to use an other brand, not HP, to fill your printer, you can’t because if no chip is detected despite a cartridge being inserted, the machine will tell you it is not genuine.

Another example with Rycoh. I don’t know if their printers still use this method, so take it as an example of capitalist greed more than a current situation. Laser printers are using a sealed container to process waste created during printing. Rycoh had placed a led detector inside to know when it was full and trigger an alert, stopping the machine and request for a change. Good idea in theory but in practice the detector was placed very oddly or on purpose near or in front of dust intake. So it was bathed very quickly in electrostatic dust and thus triggered the alarm very quickly, even if your container was not fully filled. The only way to solve this was to shake your waste storage, hoping it would clean the led enough to keep going for a few days or change it.

Lastly, I have a Brother printer, bought to a neighbor sale. The oven inside, which is in charge of heating the ink, had a failure. It had melted. For the price, it was a deal. I only needed to buy a new part, unplug it, replace and I had a laser printer with colours. Well, Brother had lightly soldered pins linking the connector to PCB. When I unplugged it, soldering came with it. I contacted a repair store near me telling me they don’t do it and I should ask for a repair to a certified Brother technician. Which is overpriced. I also can’t open it fully as it is placed to be impossible to repair without disassembling half of the machine.

No printer is the same, some brands are better than others. Some are well accepted on Linux with CUPS, some other not. But so far, not one brand impressed me well enough by their design to keep it open, easily fixable and long lasting.

Fuck printers

Nom one invented a good printer still

Ah yes, the good old way of throwing electromagnetic waves at people after putting their cymatic scans inside a shared pool of neutrally and selected shared consciousness of dissected sociopaths brains.

I didn’t have it on my Bingo card.

Psycho Pass.

Another one to the list. Great anime. It’s like if Blade Runner and Minority Report had a loving relationship and a beautiful child was the byproduct of this union.

I am personally certain you are open to learn and I will try to explain why it is like that.

Because the openness of Linux makes it prone to a model of iterations if someone desires and has the need for it. Instead of Windows and Microsoft only offering a standardized path for users to take.

Plus, it is not a waste of time either if you are passionate about it. Many people working on Linux are often doing it on their spare time. It is an unpaid job done because that one person thought it would be nice to do it.

On your second point, I also disagree. Many languages exist and some people might not like a certain implementation of a software in a certain language, for many reasons. Thus, desire to port it to another arises and they do it. Again, Linux and open source software is by essence an invitation to take something and modify it as you wish.

We often think that someone writing a piece of software in a language did it because it was the best language to do it. It is quite untrue. For many years Linux was mostly written in C language. Rust arrived and some people saw its perks as it was more secure in some aspects. Then they started to write modules for Linux in Rust. It brought up some discussions across the community because views diverged between its members. Some didn’t want to see Rust take a larger part into the kernel and some wanted it to be more present.

Also, programming languages and softwares are written by humans and humans have bias. We often have preferences or personal experiences shaping our lives. So points of view are divergent. Like right now, you have some arguments and I have mine. All that helps us evolve and change our views on the world around us.