Microsoft has detailed that Windows 11 is going to switch away from dedicated printer drivers to its Windows Ready Print system. This should make it a lot easier and less cumbersome to get printers running on Windows 11.
At the core of Windows Ready Print is a transition away from legacy, third party drive-based workflows toward modern, standards-based printing with IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) using the Windows inbox IPP printer driver.
Starting in July 2026, new printer installations will default to Windows Ready Print where supported, enabling a simpler and more reliable setup experience. This change reduces the need for traditional driver management and lays the foundation for a more scalable and predictable print experience.
↫ elliesekine at the Windows Tech Community
Printers still play a huge role in our lives – whether we like it or not – and their terrible user experience is basically a meme a this point. Making at least one aspect of printing easier, less cumbersome, and more streamlined is incredibly welcome, and I’m glad Microsoft is taking the Windows printing ecosystem along for the ride on this one.
My own personal experience with printing on Linux and now on Windows 11 (as promised, I’ve been using nothing but Windows 11 since 26 May!) has been mostly effortless already. Our cheap networked printer/scanner/combo thing from HP “just works” on both Linux and Windows 11, since Windows downloads HP’s drivers and application automatically when detecting the printer on the network. Still, not having to use HP’s driver would be a nice bonus.
Coincidentally, I also managed to get the printer component of our HP combo thing working on… HP-UX 11i v1. Despite being more than two decades newer, our HP printer works perfectly with a printer definition file included in HP-UX, giving me full printing from CDE and the rest of HP-UX. It’s entirely useless and cost me an evening of my life, but seeing the test page and other documents from HP-UX come out of our printer, over the network, put a big smile on my face.
Sad they still are avoiding zeroConfig
CUPS is slowly moving to driverless printing as well, though it still has some issues in my experience with HP OfficeJet Pro and Color LaserJet Pro printers on non-Linux platforms like OpenBSD. Thankfully the traditional driver-based printing option is still there.
PostScript has been a thing for 40 years and it works beautifully. Adobe wants to kill it (I think they don’t issue new licenses anymore) and it allows you to use old printers on new computers and vice-versa.
But hey, let’s create new solutions for problems that should not exist. Again, the 2nd employee working for Gutenberg was a support person and the second phone line installed was a printer tech support line (the first one was a phone support line). Milk the cow forever. You will get a generation of printers incompatible with older machines and vice-versa.
Ugh.