Sonoma and CUPS?

[TheIntruder]

With the shift to AirPrint, and deprecation of CUPS, it's expected the latter will eventually be removed from Mac OS.

Has that occurred yet with Sonoma?

I have an old Brother printer that doesn't support AirPrint, and Brother supports up through Catalina.

Those drivers will install, and work fine even on Ventura, but I'm wondering if the that streak continues?

If Sonoma will require replacing a perfectly good printer with a new one because those drivers can't be installed, then it's an easy call not to update.

 

[galad]

CUPS itself is not deprecated. CUPS printer plugins are deprecated, but those are not used by AirPrint. I don't know if those are still supported or not.

 

[TheIntruder]

Technically, that's true, and the project may live on in a different form, but it will no longer support old printer drivers, instead relying on "bridges" to provide some legacy compatibility, albeit at the potential loss of some specific printer features.

Apple seems to have turned its back on the project, and one of the key people involved no longer works there.

It also has shown no hesitation to remove components from the OS, so the operative question is still whether Sonoma still contains the CUPS framework, and of a version that supports old printer drivers?

Even if I had interest in buying a new printer that likely has consumables linked to DRM and/or a subscription scheme, it wouldn't be driven by the churn of incremental annual software updates.

 

[hobowankenobi]

I have no insight on 14...but I would be surprised if CUPS will be missing or even changed much.

While AirPrint/driverless printing is fine for basic consumer stuff, I have not seen any enterprise or professional-level printers that can be used without specific drivers. Without a real replacement option, Apple will have to continue to support drivers via CUPS or something similar. As Apple owns CUPS (last I heard), I don't see them walking away from it without a replacement path.

 

[galad]

The replacement is to write an app that expose the printer as an IPP printer. There isn't really any intrinsic limitation in the IPP protocol (on which AirPrint in based.)

 

[VictoryHighway]

I have an old printer that doesn’t natively support AirPrint, so I setup a Raspberry Pi to run CUPS to serve as an intermediary, and it works great.