CUPS protocol changed.

Since CUPS v1.6.0 the network protocol changed so that printer browsing is removed. This means that if you were used to connect to network printer with a Linux client, this doesn’t work anymore. You now have to manually connect printers. The server now publishes the printers using zeroconf, so you need a working avahi server running next to the cups server.

This all seems a step back for the ease of use for printing on Linux. The goal is that CUPS will implement the IPP everywhere concept so that the latest mobile devices also can use your CUPS server. Right now it works between Linux systems. I can’t test my mobile devices because they are too old to see if it works.

I have added an article about avahi setup and updated the CUPS article. If you are not ready for this change, you may want to keep CUPS 1.5.4 installed and block upgrades of the cups and libcups packages in pacman.conf.

The feature should bring more program and OS updates to migrate to IPP everywhere.