PC LOAD LETTER.
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Richard Stallman literally started the Free Software Foundation over his frustrations with a printer
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt
Xerox gave the Artificial Intelligence Lab, where I worked, a laser printer, and this was a really handsome gift, because it was the first time anybody outside Xerox had a laser printer. And, you know, copiers jam, but there's somebody there to fix them.
Well, we had an idea for how to deal with this problem. Change it so that whenever the printer gets a jam, the machine that runs the printer can [...] tell the users who are waiting for printouts go fix the printer.
But at that point, we were completely stymied, because the software that ran that printer was not free software. It had come with the printer, and it was just a binary.
And then I heard that somebody at Carnegie Mellon University had a copy of that software. So I was visiting there later, so I went to his office and I said, "Hi, I'm from MIT. Could I have a copy of the printer source code?" And he said "No, I promised not to give you a copy." He had signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Now, this was my first, direct encounter with a non-disclosure agreement, and it taught me an important lesson -- [..] non-disclosure agreements have victims. They're not innocent. [...]
(he goes on for a bit, but ultimately describes never accepting any software that requires signing an NDA ever, and then goes on to write his own unix)
You really don’t have to if you just make your kids use the computer instead of the phone
Someone really ought to make a printer that doesn't suck and is simple to use.
We are complaining about printers now? Outstanding! I can help! I never miss the opportunity to say double-fuck Hewlett Packard/Compaq and anything they’ve ever thought about producing with the heat of a thousand suns. Two shitty orgs that geometrically devolved into quintessential, archetypal enshittification enshrined, the unequalled horrors that are HP printers and drivers.
We are complaining about printers now?
Sadly, no. We're complaining about age cohorts.
In the future, kindly refrain from introducing reason to my painstakingly constructed anti-HP tirades. It throws me off stride.
Are we having stereotypical talk shop about printers?
I though it was an urban legend, but I did buy a used brother and I'm def delighted. Spent less on it than a round of inkjet for my crappy Canon. Guess what, 6 months later and I'm still using the toner that came in it. I'd be in the 2nd round of dried inkjet.
Why, yes. Yes, we are.
My experience mirrors yours; 6 years later, still no issues. Moreover, old used laser Brother’s seem to love shittynonametoner.com cartridges as well.
To be fair I can make a 3D printer work more easily and for longer without any maintenance than a regular ass printer. I get that inkjets are actually super complex but bro there are now cases where it is literally easier to make a thing than to print out a picture of that thing.
That's because you can actually access everything
ever seen one of those $200k stratasys "polyjet" resin 3d printers for medlabs? i bet you they're like inkjets cubed to service, minimum. if that tech ever makes it to consumers we'll be doomed.
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So true
Just think, once we all die off, no more printers.
The responsibility of knowing how to use a printer skips a generation, much like male pattern baldness.
So, I'm reading two false claims, and I've got a long line of highly proficient bald family members to prove it
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Literally helped my parents with this last night.
Also, fuck windows for defaulting a setting I’d never seen before: “let windows manage my default printer”
That’s why it wasn’t printing. What a fucking stupid idea.
Ah, I see mom’s PC updated and it’s trying to print with the fucking “OneNote XPS” virtual printer again.
Also I see the “OneNote XPS” printer I manually remove every month is back again.
Gearing up for this tomorrow, every time I turn off automatic updates and uninstall a bunch of bullshit…every time it’s right back there.
I manually remove every month
People don't learn about cron and scripting anymore, smh my damn head.
Are they running win 11? 'Cos the queue in that doesn't work.
Literally, it's gonna print the first job then just error everything queued behind it.
Here’s my obligatory Fuck You to ink jet printers and cartridges.
A few months ago I finally got a Brother b/w multi function laser printer and not having to refill Magenta or Black regularly is no longer, and my mind is at peace.
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And I can’t even tell if it’s because printers have gotten worse or millennials are just the IT department forever.
It’s 100 % because you no longer need to understand how information technology works in order to use it.
So our parents didn’t know because the tech didn’t exist (or came late in their life), and our kids because they never needed to learn.
I work in an industry where we use computers all day and this is painfully clear. I grew up with a mouse in my hand, shortcuts are hardwired into my brain. Watching someone right click them slowly move the cursor to copy, then right click and slowly move to paste, then slowly navigate to formulas then click refresh is brutal. It literally takes them 3-4x as long as it takes me to do the same task.
On the bright side, I only work about 20 hours a week and still outperform them, so thanks I guess?
I was hella unemployed for a while, and the job centre asked me if I was good with computers. I replied "not really. I cab do a little HTML, and can sort of read JS and C++/C# but can't really write anything with them" so they sent me on a course so I could brush up on my computer skills to improve my prospects of getting a job.
I spent my first lesson teaching everyone else what the difference between left click and right click was, and how the little arrow moves when you wiggle the mouse.
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I have a great rule to promote self reliance. I'll gladly help you, but if the answer is in the first 20 results on Google, it costs you 50 euro.
I only had one relative get angry, asking how he was supposed to know if it was. I told him to check, and he angrily said "well then I might as well do it myself".
Exactly.
Those first 20 results in 2025:
- 1-4: AI slop
- 5: Reddit thread (no comments)
- 6: Reddit thread (comment including the solution has been deleted)
- 7-9: AI slop
- 10: Microsoft support forum (two pages of generic advice from support workers located in India who get paid a starvation wage)
- 11-12: stack exchange (both with poorly written questions followed by angry comments)
- 13: quora (nonsense mixed with stuff that somehow actually makes things worse???)
- 14: Wikipedia
- 15-17: AI slop
- 18: Reddit thread (only one comment "nvm figured it out")
- 19: Arch Linux forum (links to Arch Wiki)
- 20: the actual solut... no wait, it's also AI slop
18: Reddit thread (only one comment "nvm figured it out")
“Who were you, DenverCoder9? What did you see?!”
You vastly overestimate the level of these questions. Think "how do I send photos on Whatsapp".
Most of the stuff is accurately answered by the shitty AI most of the time.
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Oh, a Boomer needs tech support, of any kind, family, friend, otherwise?
$100/h.
Stop subsidizing their utter incompetence, time for 'tough love'.
A kid?
Like an actual kid?
Free.
How would they know any better?
But, let em know the first fix is free, on the house, next one will be $5, then $10... or, they can spend no money if they want to spend an hour getting tutored on the basics maybe once a week.
Generate fishermen, not fish.
Show them that they are capable, can learn, can solve problems... if they're patient and humble enough to try and learn.
Blame tablet culture. Everything is now optimally desgined for user friendliness. Kids can just download an app from the appstore and point at what they want it to do. People don't even know anymore how the filesystem on their computer works. If the dow load pup-up in chrome disappears, they think the download has dissapeared and they need to download it again.
People never knew how filesystems work. It's been tested time and again, people aside from nerds have trouble with hierarchical filesystems. They had trouble in the eighties, they had trouble in the nineties, had trouble in the two-thousandths and obviously still have trouble today. Saving every single file on the desktop didn't start with tablets.
Nerds just have no idea how the majority of the population fare with computers, and don't know that UI designers in fact test their UIs and continually check their assumptions. But nerds are cocksure in blaming UI designers and ‘tablet culture’, which culture made computing accessible to everyone from toddlers to decrepit geriatrics.
TBF, Android and iOS do not make it clear where files are going when you save them like desktop OSes do. It's almost as if they are intentionally trying to hide their file structure, especially Apple, which is beyond frustrating.
It's been known since probably the seventies that normies have trouble with hierarchical file systems. UI researchers kept testing the assumptions about file systems, and the results in the majority of populace have always been abysmal. Which is why people have the desktop piled with every file they ever created or downloaded, and why UI designers are trying to move away from shoving file systems into users' faces.
They are intentionally trying to hide it.
The default file browsers don't access the entire file structure, what exists and what you can see and edit, without root.
You can, or at least could, sideload a FOSS filebrowser, much more straightforward UI, doesnt shit itself if you arent logged into it.
What they instead do is make it really, really easy to upload all your personal files to their cloud, which is either going to cost you time, money, or your privacy.
Its why Microsoft genuinely doesnt understand why everyone hates OneDrive, why they genuinely don't see a problem with Windows becoming an AI prompt/API with ads.
Because its basically the same as the mobile UI paradigm.
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Everything is now optimally desgined for user friendliness.
Feels like the opposite to me. Modern mobile style interfaces feel extremely hostile, designed to minimise the amount of information the user can extract from the application (and maximise the amount that can be extracted from the user and sold to the highest bidder) and our control over it.
Classic desktop interfaces (and no, the stupid office ribbons are not included in that), even when poorly designed, are many orders of magnitude easier to use and navigate, and provide a lot more tools and information.
I agree, but we have two have different meanings of user friendly here.
You: The thing makes it easy to do what I want, to understand what it can do.
Them: The thing makes it easy to do what the designer wants, makes it easy to understand what the designer wants me to do with it.
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I haven’t had a printer in years. Best decision I’ve made. When you don’t have one, your need for printing things seems to decrease. We just order prints at the library the 2 times a year we need to print something for like 25 cents a page
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