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Own printers, driverless only

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The fourth panel this desktop handed to GNOME Settings, and the last one
worth owning.

Driverless only, deliberately. Adding a printer that describes its own
capabilities over IPP is supported; choosing a PPD or fetching a vendor
driver is not, and the page says so rather than pretending. That
restraint is the whole design: a wrong driver produces a printer that
accepts jobs, reports success, and prints nothing, which is the worst
failure this page could ship because it looks like it worked. A printer
old enough to need a PPD stays a job for the system printer tool.

Printers and the queue are separate cards because they answer separate
questions. Which printers exist is one; where a document went is the
other, and it is the one that actually brings someone here -- so the
queue is a single list across every printer.

Device URIs are validated by scheme before reaching CUPS, whose backends
run as root. file: and pipe: do not lead to a printer and are refused
here rather than further down.

This machine has no printer, so the page was built against a temporary
CUPS queue that was created, exercised through the service, and removed;
the service was confirmed to observe the removal rather than merely
perform it. Discovery and the driverless add path are verified by their
refusals rather than against hardware.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
This commit is contained in:
Gabriel Brown
2026-08-19 15:07:17 -04:00
parent 914d58f52b
commit e9d567aa72
11 changed files with 944 additions and 5 deletions
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docs/superpowers/plans/2026-08-19-desktop-integration.md
+12 -4
View File
@@ -202,12 +202,20 @@ lock screens read. Sharing covers remote login and remote desktop, and reports
file and media sharing as absent rather than offering a switch for software that
is not installed.
**Still handed to GNOME.** Printers, Color, Wacom, and Universal Access. Each
**Owned (2026-08-19, later).** Printers, driverless only. Adding a printer that
describes its own capabilities over IPP is supported; choosing a PPD or fetching
a vendor driver is not, and the page says so. That restraint is the point: a
wrong driver produces a printer that accepts jobs, reports success, and prints
nothing, which is the worst failure this page could ship because it looks like it
worked. A printer old enough to need a PPD stays a system-config-printer job.
**Still handed to GNOME.** Color, Wacom, and Universal Access. Each
wraps hardware-specific tooling with no D-Bus surface worth reimplementing, and
each launches with XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME because gnome-control-center refuses
to run otherwise. Digital Wellbeing is deliberately absent: it configures
gnome-shell's own screen-time reporting, which does not run here.
**Open question.** Whether owning Printers is worth it. CUPS has a real API, but
the panel is mostly driver discovery, and getting that wrong means a printer that
silently does not print.
**Note.** This machine has no printer, so the page was built against a temporary
CUPS queue that was created, exercised, and removed. The driverless add path
itself is verified by construction and by its refusals rather than against
hardware; the first real printer added here is worth watching.