System76!

One huge barrier is printing. I've been using Linux as my daily OS for a decade and I still have stupid problems with printers. I can't print from my laptop because the printer spits out unicode garbage if I try. My desktop works, but sometimes I have to reboot to get the print queue to clear.

Printing has always been the most brittle experience of all IT at least since when I started printing in the 80s.

To add an anecdote I let a friend print on my HP LaserJet from his Windows laptop today. It detected the printer over Wi-Fi but it could not print anything because it was missing the driver. After a 100 MB download from HP's site the installer wanted an USB connection to the printer. That friend of mine is young so he never saw a USB cable with the small squarish plug that connects to a printer (or scanner, or USB2 disk) but that's another story. The installer run for minutes and failed with an error. I told him not to trust the error and attempt to print anyway. It did print. However after a few pages a pop-up complained about a non original toner (probably true) and it stopped printing. However he managed to find the printer from his Android phone and print from there. Then he was able to print from Windows too.

All of that took about an hour. I installed Debian 13 on my laptop last week and I could detect the printer instantly and print without any problem. No driver to download. I know that I can apt install hplip to get more specific drivers but it was not necessary.

To be fair, I also have stupid problems with printers in all other OSes.

Printers are their own slice of misery that seem to transcend brand, OS, platform, etc.