In my office, we have this benign little piece of hardware called a Lexmark Z65 printer. It's a pretty standard shitty little inkjet printer. I've installed it for Windows many times. It's simple, really, you plug the printer in, and Windows tries to find drivers for it - but it can't, so you have to insert this installation disk. The installation disk installs, along with the drivers, this printer management software - whether you want it to or not (the drivers are encoded, and the management installer decodes and installs them). Wait, what do I need printer management for? Print management is something that the OS does, right? Since Windows was (theoretically) capable of printing before installing this printer, I guess it is. But Windows doesn't say "Printing started" when a print job starts! Or say "Printing complete" when a print job finishes.
Thanks to some fucking around, I brought my Apple MacBookPro into the office today. I wanted to print something, so I plugged the printer in. Nothing happened. I figured it was fucked up, and it needed that software installed, and the printer management software doesn't work on OSX. But just to be sure, I opened my Prefs and looked under printers. Hoho, there it was, the Lexmark Z65, ready to print. I was printing perfect documents within 20 seconds of connecting this thing. However, there was some confusion later, when the print job had completed, yet no electronic voice said "Printing complete".
Out of curiousity, I tried connecting the printer to my Linux box (FC5), just to see what kind of crazy error messages I would get. I figured there would be some kind of device error or something. Alas, nothing happened. Was it the same kind of nothing that happened on the Mac? To be safe, I tried to randomly print something. Presto, a print dialog box comes up, telling me that my printing will be done on a Lexmark Z65, controlled by CUPS. Yay! However, there was some confusion later, when the print job had completed, yet no electronic voice said "Printing complete".
Now, I've kinda skipped over one small little detail here: the printer management software that installs in Windows brings up this nifty little graphic that theoretically keeps track of how much ink you have left in your color and black print cartridges. You don't see that in OSX or FC5. I guess with those OSes, you have to look at the page and guess that your cartridge is dying. Just like we have been for the last 10 years.
Similar phenomenon can be seen with other peripherals. For instance, my iPod works extra well in OSX, works just great in Linux, and not at all without reformatting in Windows. My Nikon Coolpix 4300 has been auto-detected on my Mac since Jaguar, and is detected just fine in Linux, but I cannot get it to work on any PC because I've thrown the driver cd away.
Overall, what has this particular instance taught us about the "It Just Works" argument? That in respect to common peripheral detection, Linux and OSX are far superior to Windows. That discs of drivers are only necessary for Windows. That people who complain of shitty peripheral detection are simply using shitty peripherals. That many of the techniques and processes that Windroids have accepted as necessary are overly complicated. That almost no one has actually seen the Windows native printer management software.
And that Windows sucks.
