Follow-up II: More on my current situation (and complaints about politicians)

Concerning my previous text:

I have managed to print again through the pseudo-solution of removing and re-adding the printer object in “system-config-printer”. I have no idea what was wrong or how to fix it again without repeating the same pseudo-solution. I have no idea what might or might not cause the issue to re-occur, e.g. whether it will be with every printing, every unplugging of the printer, every reboot of the computer, whatnot. I do know that CUPS, or something CUPS related, has screwed up royally, as there was no valid reason for not printing (let alone pretending that printing had taken place)—the physical printer (and everything around it) was identical and identically configured before and after the re-add.

Of course, such a re-adding more than once-in-a-blue-moon would be unconscionable, as various manual settings now must be restored. Indeed, the document that I just printed was an A4 document destined for the A4 paper in the printer’s paper tray—but the default setting of the printer object in CUPS was the U.S. “letter”*, leaving me with odd margins and the spurious feed of a blank page after the two printed pages. I just hope that the config files that I backed up contain everything—and that re-adding them does not cause another malfunction. Actually having to go through the 1001 settings manually is not something that I wish to do again.

*I suspect that A4 dominates “letter” outside of the U.S. making this an odd default choice.

More generally, the delete-and-add-again, reboot-the-computer, reinstall-the-OS, whatnot school of “fixing” problems is a destructive dead-end, a sign that the “fixer” is not up to the problem. When it comes to professional IT-support, as with Chris O’Dowd’s mantra of “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”, it is an utter disgrace. In these cases, a true fix of the problem is avoided for the short-term convenience of the support—and often in a manner that indicates that the support worker knows too little about the topic at hand. (Indeed, my own knowledge of CUPS is far more superficial than my knowledge of, say, Vim and Bash.) The complete ignorance and the mania with rebooting, even among many Linux users volunteering as “experts” on stackexchange, can be disturbing. For instance, it is fairly common to see “advice” like “Add kernel module X to /etc/modules-load.d*. Reboot. If everything works, carry on. Else boot into rescue mood and remove module X again.”, where it should be basic knowledge that something like “Do modprobe X. If everything works, add X to /etc/modules-load.d* so that it will be automatically added again in two months time, when you next reboot. If not, do modprobe -r X.” is far better.

*Reservations for the exact directory. It has been a while.

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