OpenPrinting - We continue to make printing just work!
2001 - 2026: 25 years of OpenPrinting!
Till Kamppeter
Till is leader of OpenPrinting since it was founded in 2001, introduced the CUPS printing system in Mandrake Linux in 2000 working at MandrakeSoft and with this and a lot of evangelism (booths, talks, workshops) made the other distros also switch to CUPS, 2006-2025 printing maintainer at Canonical, 2025-2026 funded by Sovereign Tech Fund, co-organizing annual meetings with the Printer Working Group (PWG), since 2008 every year mentoring in Google Summer of Code, doing everything to make printing on Linux and alike operating systems "just work". Due to the fact that printing goes through several daemons (CUPS, Printer Applications) got a daemon snapper and Snap enthusiast and evangelist. Co-founder and organizer of the Opportunity Open Source conferences in India since 2023. Till is also fellow of the Linux Foundation.
Akarshan Kapoor
I break complex systems into simple ideas, then turn them into Linux-based software that actually ships. By day I write code for hardware-near, Linux-powered systems; by night I am teaching AI to be my most overpowered teammate and quietly using it to scale myself.
I like my systems stable, my terminal always open, and my tools just powerful enough to keep me always learning.
Conference attendees to Till:
Printing works better than under Windows or Mac!
Michael Tunnell, TuxDigital, says in one of his videos:
There is no such thing like a pain-free experience of printing under Windows ... Linux printing is ridiculously good ...
This year we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of OpenPrinting.
After having been laid off from Canonical last year I am now covered by the Sovereign Tech Agency until the end of this year. After that I need sponsors and/or members, especially companies who benefit from printing just working in Linux and open source software. So your help is needed.
In this talk I will first tell what we are doing and what we have achieved.
Then I will go through our current work: What is planned for CUPS? How do we improve the desktop experience and how do we make the desktop ready for CUPS 3.x?
And I am not only talking about KDE and GNOME but also about the newcomer COSMIC and my collaboration with System 76.
The printing stack is an essential part of the system infrastructure. Therefore it must be reliable and secure, and this requires thorough testing of the code. I will tell about our new development in CI testing, fuzz testing with OSS-Fuzz, and having gotten security-audited.
And to conclude, I will have a special guest today, Akarshan Kapoor, former GSoC contributor for OpenPrinting, presenting the concept of Scanner Applications, scanner drivers for immutable systems and sandboxed packaging. He will also demo his work on the hallway track, at least if we get the hardware needed.
See also the videos linked above.
- Date:
- 2026 June 26 - 10:30
- Duration:
- 45 min
- Room:
- Sala Benamocarra 23
- Conference:
- OpenSouthCode 2026
- Language:
- English
- Track:
- Difficulty:
- Easy
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