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Why the driver is working less often

Started by bchemnet, August 31, 2019, 17:17:55

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bchemnet

HP has shown no interest in updating the Samsung printer driver, and has no financial incentive to do so (after all, there has not been a new Samsung-branded printer in nearly 3 years as of this moment).  As of this post, the latest driver release is nearly 3 years old, and is really based on code that is now 5 or more years old.  So the driver is going to gradually stop working on modern Linux systems as Linux and CUPS continue to evolve.

In addition, qt3 and qt4 are long obselete, so the Configurator packages (last updated 7 years ago) will often not install, or even if they do they still not work.  This will continue to get more frequent.  Even if you do manage to get everything installed, note that the relevant qt packages depend on an obselete and insecure openssl, and will not work with a modern library.  That is the main reason I am not attempting to repackage these programs in a way that will allow them to be installed even after distros drop the necessary dependencies.

Finally, CUPS has made design changes that, starting with version 2.3 (included in most mid-2019 Linux distros), are intended to make all drivers and PPD (printer instruction) files obselete.  As of 2.3, some releases of CUPS already do not work with the Samsung PPD files due to the use of non-standard keys in the Samsung PPD files.  Sometime in the next couple of years, it is likely that a current CUPS install will simply not work at all with these drivers on any system.  The new approach for CUPS is based entirely on the IPP protocol, which some (but by no means all) Samsung printers support, to varying extents.  See, for example:
https://www.cups.org/blog/2018-06-06-demystifying-cups-development.html
https://github.com/apple/cups/issues/5562

Somewhat related, scanning support that depends on the Samsung drivers continues to get less reliable each year due to various system changes in Linux, and there is no work around for this.

So nearly all Samsung-branded printers are going to stop working in Linux over the next few years if you keep an up-to-date system.  I will continue to host the files and resources here for a couple of more years, but after that there will not be much point and the best solution to a non-working Samsung printer will probably be to replace it.

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