Linus Torvalds recently vented on Google+ about needing the root password on a SuSE install to add a printer. He's not wrong, but I don't think he goes far enough.¹

The idea of "adding" a printer comes from the days when printers were actual hardware peripherals, like a sound card or a mouse. You'd need some privileges to add or change hardware, generally because it meant new drivers had to be loaded into the operating system kernel. A buggy driver could bring down the whole system. So to protect the system, loading kernel drivers — and thus changing any hardware — were made to require higher privileges.

Today, a printer is another service on the network. A printer is a network service, complete with an IP address, where you send it bits, and it sends bits back to you. And hopefully, it prints some of the bits onto dead trees. Using a new printer is more like using a new web site than it is like adding hardware.

Just as you don't need to "add" facebook to your browser in order to use it, you shouldn't have to "add" a network printer to your system in order to use it. Linus is annoyed that it takes root privileges on SuSE to add a printer, but I'm annoyed every time I need to add a printer at all. It reminds me how little the software side of printing has advanced, and how far it has to go.

¹As an aside, it's telling that a number of Linus's responders claimed the system is "working as intended", suggesting that fiddling with sudo or /etc/groups is the "linux way" to enable such things. This view of the "linux way" as protecting the arbitrary rules of the system instead of designing for the end user is why I don't run linux on my machines any longer. But that's another post. ↺