On Wednesday, July 19, 2017 at 4:02:06 PM UTC-4, Jean-Philippe Ouellet wrote: > Hello fellow Qubesers, > > Qubes continues to make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and makes > me want to share it with the world. > > I've been quite busy with real-world things recently and had to use > several different printers & scanners. Prior experience has > conditioned me to expect frustration, or at least annoyance. > > On windows I have memories of disabling driver signature enforcement, > installing some big printer "drivers" from totally unauthenticatable > sources, which then actually come with bloated desktop applications > with features like "scan with your webcam". (Hello scanner company: if > that worked well, then nobody would buy your scanners or install their > drivers!) Oh, and the fancy ink level reporting dialogues saying > things like "You have -60012% cyan ink left! Click <dead link> to buy > more now!" - those are great. > > On OS X I remember the days of force-killing the printer app as the UI > blocks indefinitely while waiting for a reply from the printer which > isn't coming. Or the network printer which somehow gets a different > DHCP lease every day resulting in a list of 20 saved printers > "helpfully" auto-discovered and persisted, all with the same name, all > indistinguishable in the UI, but only one of which actually works. > > On various Linuxes & *BSDs, I remember wrestling for days on every > install to get lpd and cups working, and then dealing with differences > in postscript parsers causing messed up formatting, and stupid udev > rules running things of massive complexity as root so that your > scanner would have a really easy time if it wanted to compromise > you... *sigh* > > On Qubes, it's a completely different story. First, I pass my USB > printer or scanner through to a DispVM. To print, I just copy the file > to the DispVM, open it with anything, and print it, and the printer is > automatically found and "just works" (thanks Fedora). To scan: I pass > the printer to a DispVM, open simple-scan, click the scan button, and > it just works! When I'm happy with my scan, I copy it out of the > DispVM and then convert to trusted PDF! So far every printer or > scanner just works the first time, I haven't needed to look under the > hood for anything. > > With sys-usb, DispVMs, and convert-to-trusted-pdf I feel reasonably > confident that if the printers or scanners were malicious, the worst > they could do is mutate my documents or store them for later retrieval > by an adversary (which is an inherent problem with any commodity > printer and totally unrelated to the OS used to interface with). This > would be even more true with a stateless laptop without any persistent > mutable firmware for the USB controllers, and when sys-usb can act > like a DispVM itself without hacks (R4?). > > Qubes may be far from my theoretically ideal OS, but it absolutely > hits a pragmatic sweet spot improving security *and* usability > simultaneously. > > Might I dare re-purpose a colored slogan and say Qubes is truly > "making computers great again"? :P > > Sincerely, > Jean-Philippe > > > </rant> Now back to work...
I do a network printer for convenience, this way I don't have to pass anything or transfer anything. if in appvm just right click and open file in the dispvm to print. increases usability and possibly security, but reduces privacy. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-users@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/df4c9480-e74c-4b16-a937-29b25017a426%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
