CUPS is unusable

[Anonymous]

My career started with Microsoft XENIX.  Give you some idea of how long I've been around Unices?

So...my impression of CUPS?  If CUPS were to be listed in a software dictionary, there would only be one synonym: "clusterf**k".

Now, mind you, this is just an impression.  For all I know, the underlying software may, for all I know, be amazingly elegant.  However, the "CUPS experience" has been so miserable that I would never know it.

Unfortunately, "how in the world could anyone design such a poor system" is very much within my imagination - it's when someone has an excellent idea backed up with (possibly) a great deal of expertise coupled with a complete lack of understanding with how people work.

So, will I master CUPS?  Only as much as I have to to get things to work - and with CUPS, that means becoming pretty adept at a lot of nonsense.

PS
Sadly, some of the latest Linuxes don't seem to offer any old-fashioned "lpr" methods anymore.  "lpr" still could present technical challanges - but it didn't have any pretense about being usr-freindly...and you could write a bunch of scripts and/or html cgi's to let a regular user administer it (try that with CUPS!).