On the one hand, it's nice that Epson provided a Linux package.
On the other, it's a pain in the arse that it's specific to a handful of distributions.
I had a V33, and I use Void. At one point I was able to get it shimmed together, there was a wrapper package for the vendor-specific modules, but eventually it stopped working, so I went to the Goodwill and came home with a Canon LIDE 100 that Just Worked with SANE.
I'm not sure what I'd do if I had to buy new. It feels like the entire consumer scanner market is sort of dead. I can recall when you could go into any computer/electronic big-box shop and see a bunch of cheap little flatbed parallel (or eventually USB) scanners for like USD50 or less. They were a common sweetener in the name-brand PC bundles of the late 1990s/early 2000s. Now there's virtually nothing under USD100. It feels like it's a solved problem, too-- most home users don't need ever-increasing resolution or scan speed, so they could just keep cranking out 20 year old already-amortized designs.
My mom recently asked me to print something on her old HP printer from her laptop with Windows.
I was having a hard time (the laptop runs very slowly although it is an i5 with 16GB of RAM) so I installed hplip on my laptop and printed it from there.
I had to smile at how easy things have become in Linux that Windows got me frustrated and Linux solved the issue so quickly.
Just download a third party binary? That is the Windows experience. It may work today, but who knows in a few years.
If you buy hardware for personal use, buy what has upstream support instead. If it works out of the box in a Linux desktop today, it will work in ten years time just the same.
This isn't so much of a blog post, though. For this format, I like keeping a notes site (mine is at https://notes.stavros.io/), where I publish small tips and things I want to remember, and figure someone else might need at some point.
On the other, it's a pain in the arse that it's specific to a handful of distributions.
I had a V33, and I use Void. At one point I was able to get it shimmed together, there was a wrapper package for the vendor-specific modules, but eventually it stopped working, so I went to the Goodwill and came home with a Canon LIDE 100 that Just Worked with SANE.
I'm not sure what I'd do if I had to buy new. It feels like the entire consumer scanner market is sort of dead. I can recall when you could go into any computer/electronic big-box shop and see a bunch of cheap little flatbed parallel (or eventually USB) scanners for like USD50 or less. They were a common sweetener in the name-brand PC bundles of the late 1990s/early 2000s. Now there's virtually nothing under USD100. It feels like it's a solved problem, too-- most home users don't need ever-increasing resolution or scan speed, so they could just keep cranking out 20 year old already-amortized designs.
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