Network printer detection -- avahi not included?

So after a while of trying to figure out why my network printer wasn’t showing up when I hit the “Add Printer” button, I eventually found my way to the Printing page on the wiki. I knew my problem was solved the second I read the line:

If easy detection of network printers is needed (not all editions have avahi installed and running) the following service can be installed & started:

pamac install avahi
sudo systemctl enable --now avahi-daemon.service

Sure enough, that worked.

But why didn’t my edition of Manjaro include avahi out of the box? It seems like the sort of no-brainer utility that should be there in the main Manjaro GNOME edition that I downloaded from the Manjaro website.

Unless of course that somehow isn’t the edition I got? But I even did the checksum thing, so did it just install differently? Can anyone explain what’s going on?

Manjaro Hello says I’m running Ruah 21.3.1.

Unless it’s changed as I haven’t had to reinstall Manjaro in several years the full version has avahi installed and running and the minimal does not.I used the minimal version and had to install and enable it to get file sharing working with Gnome.The KDE version worked as it was installed and running with the minimal version.
Glad you have it working.

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That’s weird; I definitely downloaded the full version. I flashed it to a USB drive and installed on three different machines, and this happened on all of them. That suggests to me it’s something to do with the files I downloaded… or maybe something got corrupted while I was flashing it…

Either something must be faulty on my end, or somebody forgot to include avahi in the release that was published when I downloaded it.

avahi is installed on all editions, however it’s not enabled by default. It’s up to the user to customize their installation according to their needs.

avahi is installed on all editions, however it’s not enabled by default.

  1. If that’s true, then why is the Wiki wording so ambiguous? Why does it include installation in the instructions if it’s not necessary? I mean it’s pretty obvious the Wiki gets sparingly little attention, but the original information had to come from somewhere. In fact it looks like it was probably written by someone who downloaded the minimal version of Manjaro, not the full version that most people would use. Anyhow, if you can confirm your information is correct, I’d be happy to go edit the Wiki accordingly.
  2. 99% of people trying to switch to a Linux desktop from Windows are going to expect that their OS can detect network printers out of the box. I legitimately don’t understand who this is catering to. Why would anyone want the avahi package installed, but switched off? It makes no sense – either you don’t want avahi, and you should uninstall it altogether (thus effectively switching it off) or you do, and you need to enable it (and the vast majority of newcomers aren’t going to know this, so they’ll have to spend a bunch of time and energy digging around in the documentation like I did). And anyone who’s knowledgeable enough and happens to have a specific, minority use case that requires that avahi is disabled, imo should really just be using the Manjaro minimal edition. Isn’t that what it’s for?

It’s up to the user to customize their installation according to their needs.

those that need something, should install it

That sounds like the Arch mentality leaking. This kind of thinking should full stop after the minimal edition. Anything claiming to be a full desktop OS should, at the very least, not require me to touch the terminal just to print something.

Otherwise, kindly consider dropping the slogans “Enjoy the Simplicity” and “OS for Everyone”, because they’re rather misleading. Maybe “Another distro for nerds” or “Enjoy learning terminal commands” would be more accurate.

Honestly, I’m beginning to think the biggest reason Linux hasn’t gone mainstream is that the communities just don’t want it to.

I, kind of, agree with this. Rolling release distros aren’t for beginners. And no OS is for everyone, especially not Linux.

I guess you are one of those people that Linux just isn’t for.

Less Linux for others, moar Linux for me.

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You started right, but in regard with how you idealize things, and you got very wrong about avahi
See

and also see

More about avahi and understanding it

Is your profile description acurate?

image

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