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Samsung printer drivers will not work with CUPS 3.0

Started by bchemnet, June 29, 2024, 07:40:22

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bchemnet

Summary: starting in a year or two, the vast majority of Samsung-branded printers will no longer be able to print when using a version of Linux incorporating CUPS 3.0 or higher.

When CUPS 3.0 is released, printer drivers will no longer function.  The only printing methods supported by CUPS will be driverless options listed here:
https://openprinting.github.io/driverless/

Most Samsung printers do not support any of these options (although some later models do apparently work with IPP, possibly with a reduced feature set).  While the CUPS team has provided a limited mechanism for driver-mandatory printers to still function the 3.0 series, that mechanism is not applicable to the Samsung driver.  The CUPS team has effectively declared that these older printers are simply to not be supported.  I do not have any information to help you determine if your printer is an impacted one or not, other than to suggest that you try installing it using IPP instead of the driver (which can be done with existing CUPS versions) and see if it works.

As of May 2024, the planned release of CUPS 3.0 is "mid-2025".  It has been pushed back several times already, so it may be later.  And your particular distro may not incorporate CUPS 3.0 until significantly later still.  But once 3.0 is on your system, the Samsung (or HP version) drivers will cease to function.

Note that all the packages will still be installable, as I have no plan to make them explicitly conflict with CUPS 3.0, and I will continue to provide the Samsung installers as well.  There are two reasons for that: (1) the scanning functions of the drivers will still likely be useful to some people even when the printing drivers do not work, and (2) I do not want to cripple any possibility of a future work-around that allows these drivers to continue working, though I view that as extremely unlikely.

Use of this repository has slowly been declining since Samsung sold off their printer business, and HP sold only a couple of models that used the same driver system.  I anticipate a significantly greater rate of decline over the next few years, but I intend to leave this resource in place as long as there are a significant number of people apparently benefitting from its availability.

At this time, I do not anticipate any future updates to the packages or content.  Therefore, there is no reason to leave the repository enabled on computers once the desired packages have been installed.

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