Hendrik Boom wrote:
> I think that Brother is one of the companies that advertises actual
> Unix support, and that my printer an HL-3170CDW, at least, accepts a
> variety of networked protocols, including some that originated in Unix.
> But I don't know how to access them without CUPS.
>
> There must be a way.

I've had a lot of problems with getting hardware working properly with
Linux, so when I bought my last printer, I tried to do some research
on what printers had support for Linux. As mentioned, Brother
advertises support. So, I ended up buying my first (and probably
last) Brother printer. Besides the fact that the model seems to have
an issue with the ink and stops printing often, I found out that the
drivers are proprietary. There are rpm and deb versions of the driver
(in binary format) and I've seen some information on how to get them
to work with systems like Slackware that need tarballs. However, if
you're running with a different processor or using a different C
library like uclibc (which I was at one point) or musl, you're going
to have issues. The way I've seen FreeBSD users get Brother printers
running is to run Linux versions of printing software using their
Linux compatibility layer.

Postscript printers seem like the best option. Similar to DOS
systems, you can copy a binary file to lpt, serial, etc.
Unfortunately, many printers these days are not Postscript compatible.
PCL seems like the most supported format after Postscript. That's
where programs like GhostPCL come in. A lot of printers support the
wingdi format which is based on Windows GDI (graphic device interface)
API. I've only seen a few projects that try to support that on Linux.

Cups may be a great solution for a corporation or a situation where
printers are networked. I think it can be overkill for a single user
with a dedicated printer. As mentioned, Cups does work on BSD and
Apple systems so the systemd dependency should not be a real issue.
It seems to be used as the default printing option on most Linux
systems I've looked at. It would be really nice to have some viable
alternatives for users who don't need all the features Cups can
provide. I like the idea of trying to avoid monopolies in
libraries/programs. Cups seems to be a monopoly on most systems at
this point. David mentioned he just put up a wiki. Maybe we can
start a page and list some alternatives there. It would be really
great to see information on printing, audio, init/startup
libraries/utilities and other basic systems documented somewhere in
more detail. Information is typically scattered all over the Internet
and some of it is so dated it's no longer relevant. If a user knows
what's available and the pros and cons, he/she can make more informed
choices and possibly even create something to fill in a gap.

GhostPCL isn't in the Debian archives and I believe the reason might
be because the GhostPCL build scripts were not designed to allow use
of system libraries in place of their packaged third party libraries.
It would be nice to find another alternative, but if nothing efficient
is available at this point, I've been considering creating alternative
build scripts that would use system libraries whenever possible. I'm
pretty sure if alternative build scripts are used, the GhostScript
project would not want anything to do with support. One would have to
check for/submit bugs on their official versions. It would at least
be one alternative for printers that used PCL instead of Postscript.