I see people recommend this _all the time_ and yet as far as I know the only way to legally obtain LTSC is via a 45$/month subscription to MSDN. Is there some other avenue I'm not aware of? If not, then that price is absurd for a feature set that used to be available by default in Windows 7.
Until recently there was a free Bizspark program which granted you five MSDN subscription for two years. Apart from that, there is a Action Pack which comes with (among others) three MSDN subscriptions and ten Windows 10 Enterprise licenses for 500 USD/yr.
When I still used it ~5 years ago, there were additional conditions on Action Pack licenses. AFAIR your company had to generate 80% of income from software development or similar services to be eligible and licenses were for internal use only.
After ending the subscription there was a one year grace period to either obtain new license, renew subscription or remove the software. In BizSpark you got to keep the licenses, apart from MSDN subscription of course.
AFAIK it's only available through volume licensing, which means you can't buy a single copy (you need around 30 licenses minimum, I believe). However, I've heard stories of people bypassing this limit by buying 1 license for LTSC (~$300), and then 29 CAL licenses (a few dollars each) as a filler.
If you're not particularly concerned about licensing though, just pirate it.
The minimum volume license buy is 5 licenses. Any good reseller will sell you 1 copy of LTSC and 4 of the cheapest SKU in the catalog (usually $5-10 / ea) to get your volume license contract started. After that you can purchase piecemeal for 2 years before you need to fulfill the minimum purchase again. The licenses themselves are perpetual.
I don't like it, but it's not too hard to do either.
Without the requisite infrastructure (SCCM or Intune, honestly, to make it sing), this isn't recommended. No Microsoft Store means no WSL distros (without fiddling), no updates to system applications (maybe you like this), no Windows Terminal (again, without fiddling).
Just get Enterprise or Education (which if you know a kid with a Office 365 acccount from their school, they can log into Azure and get a MSDN key for free[0]), and run ShutUp 10 to kill the telemetry. Or just set the three to four GPOs. Done.
This is great info. I searched for "LTSC Windows 10", and got to the linked page[0]. However, this line jumped out at me:
The Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) is designed for Windows 10 devices and use cases where the key requirement is that functionality and features don’t change over time.
What?? Is there a requirement scenario where this is NOT true? I don't buy and set up my OS/computers just so things break randomly because of forced updates.
Why do companies do this? Why is avoiding breaking updates considered a hipster/contrarian/rebellious thing?
Unbelievable. I was this close buying a new printer. I mean it's really a weird error which does not look like a hardware issue, but after testing the printer on three different PCs (all running latest Windows 10, of course) with the same result, I was convinced it's a problem with the printer.
I have a Windows 10 machine with an old HP printer (laserjet 1012) that requires manual driver installation. Every single time there's a major Windows update it blows away the driver and I have to install the driver again. Extremely annoying.
I think his point is that he shouldn't have to do that and I agree with that.
System updates have been a mostly solved problem since Windows XP (or maybe earlier) and I don't recall updates outright deleting installed software until Windows 10 came out.
Windows 10 obviously uses a different update model (it's essentially a full OS reinstall) but this model should've been developed taking into account the requirements of the old one, and I think "leave installed software/drivers alone" is a very important one.
Releasing a half-baked implementation that is worse than the old one is very sloppy. To the eyes of the user it doesn't matter how "good" the underlying details is (I guess the new model does have some advantages on a technical level), if it wipes out existing software and makes certain peripherals not work it's an overall negative and shouldn't have been released.
I believe the issue is that since the printer is so old, there is no driver available for Windows 10. Checking the HP site, the latest is for Vista from 2008, so dragons are to be expected when you run with drivers on an OS that isnt listed as being compatible with significant architectural changes.
I dont think its fair to blame the OS here and in this case you may get a better experience, and maybe security (removing those old HP background processes running with elevated privileges) using microsofts generic postscript printer drivers.
The problem here doesn't seem to be the driver. The driver appears to be working once installed. The problem is that the driver gets removed every time a major system update is installed. The update system used to be fine in this regard and they decided to rewrite it in such a way that it doesn't keep existing drivers even if they appear to be compatible.
As stated in a previous comment, you're installing drivers for another model of printer. So I find it unreasonable to believe there wont be problems down the line even if they appear to be working.
HP has a Universal Print Driver that will support your printer and be compatible with Windows 10 with out resorting to installing drivers meant for another printer. Not exactly a high prority test case for Microsoft.
> you're installing drivers for another model of printer
That shouldn't be the OS's decision to make. The user wanted his machine to install something, and the something even worked fine after install.
Are you advocating for the OS deleting files/software that it considers "wrong" without explicitly asking the user?
Besides that, the driver appears to be fully compatible because it works fine once reinstalled. It would be one thing if the driver just stopped working (because the printing driver API changed, which is fair enough for a decades-old printer), but in this case it's not about API incompatibility but a broken update system.
The driver works fine. It's a black laser printer, there isn't any fancy feature to have problem with. It prints what I tell it to print.
> HP has a Universal Print Driver that will support your printer and be compatible with Windows 10
The last time I checked, none of the official driver on the vendor website worked, nor the automatic driver that Windows installed. I mean that would be the obvious first thing people check when their devices don't work... For me using those drivers just printed out an error.
I have the same printer. I didn't even know you could get it to work in windows anymore! I only use it in Linux and Mac. I thought I saw on HPs website there solution for Windows was to get a new printer lol.
They should but then big projects also need an additional testing team. Especially for something like Windows, there are too many possible variations for a non-dedicated person to test all of them.
How do you imagine that scales for an operating system the size of Windows ? Every time you check in code you check against each of the 2000 printers released in the last 20 years ?
Engineers SHOULD be responsible for testing code they write themselves.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the need for QAs to test as well.
At the very least there is a completely different psychology required in testing, where the goal is to break things, but when you are the person who has created that thing there is sub conscious resistance to breaking things too much.
> when you are the person who has created that thing there is sub conscious resistance to breaking things too much.
Definitely this. I'm primarily a developer, but while I can do a good job of QA on someone else's code, I find it almost impossible to do a thorough job on my own.
For me I think the reason I can't do a thorough job on my own code is down to a combination of two reasons:
1) Testing my own code is boring. I keep thinking about what it should do and then taking shortcuts where I don't test every possible circumstance because I believe I can infer what will happen in one case from another.
2) Testing my own code is time I'm not spending working on the next bit of code in my queue. At a certain point I start feeling like I should just be working on the next thing
For me, I think it's partially that I have too many preconceptions about how the code will be used. I still have the implementation in mind when I'm testing. Whereas good QA will be naive and test things that the dev might not have thought of.
That only works for extremely simple projects with very small teams working on "hobby projects". For anything serious you need an independent and professional QA team which essentially does nothing else than trying to break the product all day in and out.
Programmers should be required to do enough local testing to not break the build of course, but the same person who wrote the code can't also thoroughly test it, because they'll inevitably only test the "happy path", even if they don't intend to.
There comes a point though when theres too much QA that seriously hampers development and progress because they turn the smallest change into a year long shitfest of "hold on we are testing!". Microsoft for awhile got a bit heavy on QA, unforunately they also went full retard the other direction.
I try to be thorough, but at some point I have to write code other than test code. For systems with a lot of emergent complexity, it's possible I've covered 9 of the 10 paths, good or bad, and missed one bad one.
Maybe they should be, but the record shows that Microsoft engineers aren't doing as good of a job testing their own stuff as Microsoft engineers in test were doing.
Is the cost savings worth it? For Microsoft, I don't know. It depends on how much brand damage they make with this. Apple has its own desktop OS value destruction process, and Google is killing off Cloud Print for its desktop OS, and replacing it with hope and dreams (hope and dreams only available if your chrome device still gets updates, but the windows cloud print server is already gone from windows chrome)
The Windows print spooler is a surprisingly complex piece of software, there is a ton of legacy in there. I would assume it's quite difficuly to maintain.
Why is printing such a pain? Shouldn't you just be able to send a pdf file to the printer by network/usb/whatever and the printer should be able to print it? Why do we still need drivers?
Just last Friday we talked about that, why not send just a kind of PDF to the printer.
We got a month ago new printer in our company. Now we just print, walk to any printer in the company and login with the card. Now we have to choose our printer job and we could change from color to bw. But we can't change the paper size.
Mostly cost. There are printers that have computers in them that know how to read PDF, the "networked" or "cloud" or "business" ones. But they all cost more -- anywhere from $300 to $1000+.
The cheap ones just have some tiny microprocessor that knows how to read the proprietary bitmap sent from the computer, and rely on the host PC for font rendering etc.
(Rendering fonts and vectors from a PDF can get pretty expensive!)
You underestimate how much printer manufacturers would like to shave from their hardware costs.
Besides, Postscript can be arbitrarily complex, and with modern PCs, PDFs may be similarly complex. Much easier to deal with that (both bugs and memory costs) in a driver which can be upgraded easily, rather than in firmware.
Way back when, in the early days of laser printers, the computer wouldn't be able to keep up with the printer, and a decent printer had a faster CPU than the computer it was attached to.
Is there any accept-encoding type exchange? Whereby a printer can say “hey I can accept data/pdf, data/png, or data/proprietary-format-xyz? Then the OS checks what it can send, or downloads from some central store if it can’t match any.
Not surprised. There's something in the water in the Windows print spooler. I have a Brother HL-L2380DW printer that worked "just fine," but then at some point after a Windows update, everything started printing inverted. Like literally the printer would paint the page black, except for white where the text was. I thought it was a firmware issue on the printer, but it only happened when printing in Windows.
Wasted a ton of toner trying to figure out what was going on. The solution? When adding the printer in Windows, don't add it automatically via network discovery. That will install the bad version of the driver. Manually type in the IP of the printer. That will clue Windows in to using the... correct? version of the driver? The one that doesn't invert all the colors?
Printing is a mess and our industry should be ashamed. How does something like this just break after an update? I can only imagine the absolute spaghetti bowl that is the Windows print subsystem.
Here's an official Brother FAQ outlining the "fix"[0]. I'm pretty sure it's still not fixed in Windows and continues to require this song-and-dance workaround.
Thanks so much for mentioning this! I had the same problem connecting my work laptop to the same printer and eventually just gave up after an hour of looking for an "invert colours" button.
Happy to have helped. It was actually quite an ordeal when I first ran into this.
I was printing something that I had actually inverted the colors on (a screenshot from Android of my WiFi QR code, where I use the dark theme on the phone, so I inverted it before printing), so I thought that somehow Photoshop had told the printer "this image is inverted, print the original instead" and I spent a while in the Photoshop options looking for some wacky setting that would control that.
Tried printing from Windows Photo Viewer with the same inverted result, despite seeing an image with a white background. Eventually I printed a test page from Notepad and started getting on the right track, but for a while I genuinely thought some color-inversion-but-only-for-display property had become embedded in the image file :)
> Printing is a mess and our industry should be ashamed. How does something like this just break after an update?
I have Bose wireless headphones. They used to operate as expected: leave bluetooth on at all times on the laptop. When turning the headphones off, they disconnect. When turning the headphones on, they reconnect.
Eventually there was a Windows update, and this stopped working. Now, if I turn the headphones off, only the microphone will reconnect when I turn them back on. To get sound to play through the headphones, I have to disable and then reenable bluetooth in Windows. Every time.
You know what's funny is that Microsoft does a great job with what I call "community QA" on some of their other properties, like Minecraft. The Minecraft bug tracker[0] is readily accessible and the community around it tracks down most bugs before they hit retail via their "snapshot" release cycle.
The Windows side, not so much. The words "Windows Insider" come to mind, but honestly, I have no idea how that works. It doesn't feel like there's a community around it, or if there is, it must be small. If I run into a bug post-update on Windows, I certainly don't feel empowered to pop open a Jira like I do for Minecraft.
I get that it's a different scale and all - but it seems like Microsoft should really put some effort into crowdsourcing their bug reporting if they're not going to invest thoroughly in QA/regression testing for their flagship product.
The headphones are able to connect once after disabling and reenabling bluetooth in Windows. If the problem were that the headphones are configured to use a fixed, predictable long-term key, it isn't obvious to me why Windows would accept that key sometimes, but not all the time.
(Note that I don't need to have Windows forget the device and re-pair from scratch.)
Is there some aspect of initial bluetooth negotiation that would explain this?
There was a list somewhere with devices using the wrong config. An explanation of the issue is here https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-blo... and there also is advice on checking if your device is affected. I thought the issue was that if the host initiates the connection it will work but if it's just auto reconnecting it will not but I may be wrong.
Doesn't look like the CVE is relevant. That article says it's indicated by this message:
> Your Bluetooth device attempted to establish a debug connection. The Windows Bluetooth stack does not allow debug connection while it is not in the debug mode.
I don't see that. What I see is
> A device with Bluetooth adapter address (2c:45:a1:20:a1:99) has a bad service record (attribute identifier 9). The service will not be visible.
That happens several times every time, whether the connection succeeds or not. There is also a message that appears just once, when the connection succeeds:
> Windows cannot store Bluetooth authentication codes (link keys) on the local adapter. Bluetooth keyboards might not work in the system BIOS during startup.
Searching for the first message, I found some support threads from Bose customers. They seem pretty angry about their headphones not working. :/
I recall a windows update caused all the computers in the office using some default network print driver to bluescreen on printing and if outlook was open the profile would get corrupted. People go to print an email and suddenly everything was fucked.
I assume the bad driver was running in kernal space, is there a reason to design it that way?
Can someone who knows chime in on who is responsible for providing Windows with WSD drivers? Would be interesting to figure out who actually messed up here, I somehow doubt MS just randomly picks a driver to install so the fix seems really weird.
Printing in Windows is an unsolved problem. It never was.
To print in Windows I have a checklist:
1. Print
2. Restart printer
3. Cancel print job, try to print again.
4. Restart print spooler, try to print again.
5. Restart computer, try to print.
Usually works with #4 or #5. Having a family member print is a major tech support undertaking.
At this point, as user, you have usually lost the game. This can mean anything from: "The print job can't be cancelled/deleted." to "The PC will restart that job every time you restart the PC".
I've had good success stopping the spooler and nuking system32 spooler files over powershell to fix people on the phone. it's insane I have to resort to that.
This is part of why I try to have different OSes/versions on my main PCs.
It's also nice to have the option of booting into a pre-configured USB drive with a persistent Linux environment you know will work because it's a time capsule. [It's the pre-configuring part that's a pain, but it can be worth it; do a dd copy to another identical stick once you've got it tuned up and you always have a failsafe.]
I've been ripping my hair out for the last few days trying to figure out why a UPS label printer works intermittently. The stack is a (closed-source windows only) java webserver listening on the local machine and relaying data from javascript on a web page to a printer on the local network. Lot of places for things to go wrong. I spent hours trying to find some kind of reproducible behavior and even went as far as to start rewriting the UPS print daemon in Go so I could switch the host machine to Linux. What a huge waste of time.
The file format is likely called ZPL ("Zebra Print Language") and you can actually use LPR to send the data - the raw label data - directly to the printer. Use `lpr -o raw`.
Yep, this is it. Their print daemon is basically a glorified pipe redirect from a web page to the printer. Unfortunately because of the javascript in the middle, it has to be slightly more involved than just running netcat. But not much.
OTOH shared CUPS printers are now installable with 2 clicks and without entering the CUPS URL. I have an old HP printer which doesn't work with Windows itself anymore, but works fine if connected to my Linux workstation.
I had the latest Windows update break printing, but in a different way. It could no longer connect to the network printer (hosted via CUPS on a raspberry pi). I could load the URL for the CUPS printer just fine in Chrome, but Windows itself couldn't see it. I was also unable to edit anything for the printer in Windows (the option simply wasn't there, and everything was greyed out).
The solution was to set it as the default printer, then add a new printer with the same CUPS URL. For some reason, setting it as the default allowed Windows to see it again. Then delete the new copy, and the original began working and allowed its settings to be edited. Incredibly frustrating.
87 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadSince Action Pack is a subscription, what happens to the licenses when you stop paying?
After ending the subscription there was a one year grace period to either obtain new license, renew subscription or remove the software. In BizSpark you got to keep the licenses, apart from MSDN subscription of course.
If you're not particularly concerned about licensing though, just pirate it.
I don't like it, but it's not too hard to do either.
Just get Enterprise or Education (which if you know a kid with a Office 365 acccount from their school, they can log into Azure and get a MSDN key for free[0]), and run ShutUp 10 to kill the telemetry. Or just set the three to four GPOs. Done.
[0]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/education/
you can install the microsoft store later. also, since WSL distros are appx files, you can sideload them even without the store installed.
>no updates to system applications
not sure what you mean by this. what is there to update?
The Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) is designed for Windows 10 devices and use cases where the key requirement is that functionality and features don’t change over time.
What?? Is there a requirement scenario where this is NOT true? I don't buy and set up my OS/computers just so things break randomly because of forced updates.
Why do companies do this? Why is avoiding breaking updates considered a hipster/contrarian/rebellious thing?
[0]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/l...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information...
> Affected platforms: ... Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019; ... Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2015; Windows 8.1
Got it working with Google cloud print though.
https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html
via
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7225252
System updates have been a mostly solved problem since Windows XP (or maybe earlier) and I don't recall updates outright deleting installed software until Windows 10 came out.
Windows 10 obviously uses a different update model (it's essentially a full OS reinstall) but this model should've been developed taking into account the requirements of the old one, and I think "leave installed software/drivers alone" is a very important one.
Releasing a half-baked implementation that is worse than the old one is very sloppy. To the eyes of the user it doesn't matter how "good" the underlying details is (I guess the new model does have some advantages on a technical level), if it wipes out existing software and makes certain peripherals not work it's an overall negative and shouldn't have been released.
I dont think its fair to blame the OS here and in this case you may get a better experience, and maybe security (removing those old HP background processes running with elevated privileges) using microsofts generic postscript printer drivers.
As stated in a previous comment, you're installing drivers for another model of printer. So I find it unreasonable to believe there wont be problems down the line even if they appear to be working.
HP has a Universal Print Driver that will support your printer and be compatible with Windows 10 with out resorting to installing drivers meant for another printer. Not exactly a high prority test case for Microsoft.
That shouldn't be the OS's decision to make. The user wanted his machine to install something, and the something even worked fine after install.
Are you advocating for the OS deleting files/software that it considers "wrong" without explicitly asking the user?
Besides that, the driver appears to be fully compatible because it works fine once reinstalled. It would be one thing if the driver just stopped working (because the printing driver API changed, which is fair enough for a decades-old printer), but in this case it's not about API incompatibility but a broken update system.
> HP has a Universal Print Driver that will support your printer and be compatible with Windows 10
The last time I checked, none of the official driver on the vendor website worked, nor the automatic driver that Windows installed. I mean that would be the obvious first thing people check when their devices don't work... For me using those drivers just printed out an error.
if it can be made for $50-100 i think it would be a great product.
https://kb.ucla.edu/articles/hp-laserjet-1012-and-windows-10
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the need for QAs to test as well.
At the very least there is a completely different psychology required in testing, where the goal is to break things, but when you are the person who has created that thing there is sub conscious resistance to breaking things too much.
Definitely this. I'm primarily a developer, but while I can do a good job of QA on someone else's code, I find it almost impossible to do a thorough job on my own.
1) Testing my own code is boring. I keep thinking about what it should do and then taking shortcuts where I don't test every possible circumstance because I believe I can infer what will happen in one case from another.
2) Testing my own code is time I'm not spending working on the next bit of code in my queue. At a certain point I start feeling like I should just be working on the next thing
Programmers should be required to do enough local testing to not break the build of course, but the same person who wrote the code can't also thoroughly test it, because they'll inevitably only test the "happy path", even if they don't intend to.
Is the cost savings worth it? For Microsoft, I don't know. It depends on how much brand damage they make with this. Apple has its own desktop OS value destruction process, and Google is killing off Cloud Print for its desktop OS, and replacing it with hope and dreams (hope and dreams only available if your chrome device still gets updates, but the windows cloud print server is already gone from windows chrome)
We got a month ago new printer in our company. Now we just print, walk to any printer in the company and login with the card. Now we have to choose our printer job and we could change from color to bw. But we can't change the paper size.
The cheap ones just have some tiny microprocessor that knows how to read the proprietary bitmap sent from the computer, and rely on the host PC for font rendering etc.
(Rendering fonts and vectors from a PDF can get pretty expensive!)
Besides, Postscript can be arbitrarily complex, and with modern PCs, PDFs may be similarly complex. Much easier to deal with that (both bugs and memory costs) in a driver which can be upgraded easily, rather than in firmware.
Way back when, in the early days of laser printers, the computer wouldn't be able to keep up with the printer, and a decent printer had a faster CPU than the computer it was attached to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter#Hardware - 12MHz CPU in the printer, attached to an 8MHz CPU in the Mac.
IPP is standard in (most?) linux, and Airprint is basically IPP+Avahi+some proprietary-bits.
Wasted a ton of toner trying to figure out what was going on. The solution? When adding the printer in Windows, don't add it automatically via network discovery. That will install the bad version of the driver. Manually type in the IP of the printer. That will clue Windows in to using the... correct? version of the driver? The one that doesn't invert all the colors?
Printing is a mess and our industry should be ashamed. How does something like this just break after an update? I can only imagine the absolute spaghetti bowl that is the Windows print subsystem.
Here's an official Brother FAQ outlining the "fix"[0]. I'm pretty sure it's still not fixed in Windows and continues to require this song-and-dance workaround.
[0]: https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/167000/...
I was printing something that I had actually inverted the colors on (a screenshot from Android of my WiFi QR code, where I use the dark theme on the phone, so I inverted it before printing), so I thought that somehow Photoshop had told the printer "this image is inverted, print the original instead" and I spent a while in the Photoshop options looking for some wacky setting that would control that.
Tried printing from Windows Photo Viewer with the same inverted result, despite seeing an image with a white background. Eventually I printed a test page from Notepad and started getting on the right track, but for a while I genuinely thought some color-inversion-but-only-for-display property had become embedded in the image file :)
I have Bose wireless headphones. They used to operate as expected: leave bluetooth on at all times on the laptop. When turning the headphones off, they disconnect. When turning the headphones on, they reconnect.
Eventually there was a Windows update, and this stopped working. Now, if I turn the headphones off, only the microphone will reconnect when I turn them back on. To get sound to play through the headphones, I have to disable and then reenable bluetooth in Windows. Every time.
The Windows side, not so much. The words "Windows Insider" come to mind, but honestly, I have no idea how that works. It doesn't feel like there's a community around it, or if there is, it must be small. If I run into a bug post-update on Windows, I certainly don't feel empowered to pop open a Jira like I do for Minecraft.
I get that it's a different scale and all - but it seems like Microsoft should really put some effort into crowdsourcing their bug reporting if they're not going to invest thoroughly in QA/regression testing for their flagship product.
[0]: https://bugs.mojang.com/projects/MC/issues
I mean, I get why you would blame MS for breaking this but maybe the onus is also on Bose and their ridiculously bad driver support.
The headphones are able to connect once after disabling and reenabling bluetooth in Windows. If the problem were that the headphones are configured to use a fixed, predictable long-term key, it isn't obvious to me why Windows would accept that key sometimes, but not all the time.
(Note that I don't need to have Windows forget the device and re-pair from scratch.)
Is there some aspect of initial bluetooth negotiation that would explain this?
> Your Bluetooth device attempted to establish a debug connection. The Windows Bluetooth stack does not allow debug connection while it is not in the debug mode.
I don't see that. What I see is
> A device with Bluetooth adapter address (2c:45:a1:20:a1:99) has a bad service record (attribute identifier 9). The service will not be visible.
That happens several times every time, whether the connection succeeds or not. There is also a message that appears just once, when the connection succeeds:
> Windows cannot store Bluetooth authentication codes (link keys) on the local adapter. Bluetooth keyboards might not work in the system BIOS during startup.
Searching for the first message, I found some support threads from Bose customers. They seem pretty angry about their headphones not working. :/
I assume the bad driver was running in kernal space, is there a reason to design it that way?
To print in Windows I have a checklist: 1. Print 2. Restart printer 3. Cancel print job, try to print again. 4. Restart print spooler, try to print again. 5. Restart computer, try to print.
Usually works with #4 or #5. Having a family member print is a major tech support undertaking.
At this point, as user, you have usually lost the game. This can mean anything from: "The print job can't be cancelled/deleted." to "The PC will restart that job every time you restart the PC".
Now, the printers themselves have been a cantankerous lot, but Windows' printing generally works fine at home.
You wanna see dragons? Look at the OSX print spooler. Or can someone tell me why my printer always seems to be stuck on pause??
Also compared to try to do duplex printing under linux, windows is easy.
It's also nice to have the option of booting into a pre-configured USB drive with a persistent Linux environment you know will work because it's a time capsule. [It's the pre-configuring part that's a pain, but it can be worth it; do a dd copy to another identical stick once you've got it tuned up and you always have a failsafe.]
The file format is likely called ZPL ("Zebra Print Language") and you can actually use LPR to send the data - the raw label data - directly to the printer. Use `lpr -o raw`.
If you google for "lpr print zebra zpl" you can find more specific guides, such as https://www.easypost.com/how-to-print-zpl-labels-from-the-co...
The solution was to set it as the default printer, then add a new printer with the same CUPS URL. For some reason, setting it as the default allowed Windows to see it again. Then delete the new copy, and the original began working and allowed its settings to be edited. Incredibly frustrating.