Comment 3 for bug 1253361

I have the same problem with my Canon Pixma MP450 and Ubuntu 13.10 !

System-config-printer try to install gutenprint, but is gutenprint already installed ?!!! (it's one of the default packages)

And it sits right there for all eternity. I think I could wait 2 years it will still not time out or something ...

I rebooted, I tried on a fresh install, I tried to use the second option "Local Driver" and it's even worst ! "Forward" doesn't do anything !

The only way to make this printer install, is to click on gutenprint, then, you cancel very fast the gutenprint installation, then you have the traditional list of printers ! And now it's working ?!? (yes it does work !)

Please fix your sh*t ubuntu devs ! Please make your modifications less random and untested. How in the world, is an option to bypass something (local driver) not even tested in real life ?! You are embarrassing everybody !

This printer should not even ask for a driver install, as it works perfectly with what is already there !

And why asking to install "openprinting-gutenprint" when gutenprint is already installed ?! What is the difference ?

Please explain yourself ! Remove this "anti-feature" ... Because right there, it's not a feature, it's a bug, and a big one indeed !

It feels like somebody had a good idea but never had a canon printer handy to test with, or even to know if it worked. Man, it's tiring sometime to see all theses untested features ...

I think the idea is for users with canon printer requiring proprietary drivers. And for that, it's good and neat. But if your only choice is gutenprint, ... to download and install gutenprint a second time, in case having one copy of gutenprint wasn't enough, it's bullsh*t !!! This choice shouldn't be there. Even if it worked properly !

It should be said, man, give a little more effort in your code ubuntu team, make it more error resilient, everything you do should be bypassed. It's a printer install wizard, why is this so badly butchered !

And it's not the first time we have something like that in Ubuntu, in fact, it's every time something new is coming from the ubuntu internal devs. Don't rely that much on the users to test things ! You are tiring them. If it's impossible to keep updating everything every 6 month, just stop this nonsense ! I'm using Ubuntu from 6.06, so I'm not a "quitter", but I know why one would want to stop caring about such a distribution and start searching somewhere else. Ubuntu should really start to "Eat is own dog food". That means, if you make a change, make it such that yourself or another developer can test it in real life with real hardware on the development release so most of the bugs are seen and fixed by someone that may know better.
It's faster and way more reliable than making a modification in the dark, waiting for a user that had enough to shout his anger to you all, don't know what really appended that made this mess, and having to spend the time to read, understand and decrypt what the problem is.

The fact is, despite the popularity of canon printers, I'm only the second one reporting that bug, nobody takes time nowadays to make a bug report if their is a workaround (in this case that is using cups web interface). It should warn you at how much of your users you have transformed in uncaring zombies. Even myself, as a long time ubuntu user, I feel like making a bug report is now becoming nothing else than wasting my time, waiting for something that will never appends, so might as well wait for the next release.

Sometime I think as Ubuntu as a Linux distribution developed by peoples on their Macs ! Some bugs are sometime so blatant that it feels like nobody is using it, even the developers ! (I have a lot of bugs like that in mind, for example, when you open a .deb with the Software center, the home of the software center appears, then, after some more time, the deb installer pops up. It's soooooo confusing !! A new user will think that the packets was not opened properly ... So why is this already 3/4 releases with this bug. Is this that difficult to make a "Please wait" screen so the home screen don't show up ?!)

So well, I'm rambling, but, I'm very very tired of this, Ubuntu is my work tool, and I make all I can do to make it more popular (I tell everyone interested with Linux, I make videos about it, I'm contributing to the french wiki about ubuntu, etc ...), and I'm so disappointed by the lack of interest the developers have about their own work. The 6 month schedule doesn't help them in that aspect ... But even with that. What a lack of perfectionism. Sometime you have to sit back and fix the little details that makes the difference between something good and something you really want to use ! And I hope 14.04 will be the end of this nightmare !

PS: I'm sorry for the anger level of my post, but I wasted so much time this night trying to find what was going on with this printer, that it's not even funny. And finding that it's, AGAIN, one of theses things that are supposedly made to make our life easier that is blocking the install, that makes me think lots of bad things ! And the fact that it's already reported and nobody cares for more than 2 weeks make things even worst ...