Speakers
Description
The Linux printing ecosystem is currently undergoing one of its biggest architectural transitions in decades. Since the CUPS 2.2.x series, printing has increasingly moved toward IPP-native and driverless workflows, allowing applications to print directly to discovered IPP print destinations without requiring manually created print queues, PPD files, or vendor-specific driver filters.
With the upcoming transition to CUPS 3.x, legacy printer drivers and classic PPD-based queue creation will be removed entirely from CUPS itself. Non-driverless printers will instead require Printer Applications that expose printers through modern IPP interfaces. These changes significantly affect desktop printing infrastructure and require desktop environments to adapt to more dynamic, asynchronous, and network-oriented workflows.
This talk explores the ongoing modernization work in KDE Print Manager to prepare for these changes. It covers the migration away from older synchronous request handling, improvements to UI responsiveness and request lifecycle management, and the architectural challenges involved in modernizing mature desktop infrastructure software while maintaining compatibility with existing workflows.
The session will also provide an overview of how KDE Print Manager interacts with CUPS and the broader Linux printing stack, discuss the implications of the CUPS 3.x transition for KDE and Linux desktops, and highlight future directions for modern desktop printing infrastructure.
Whether you are interested in KDE internals, Linux desktop architecture, or the future of printing on Linux systems, this talk offers insight into the engineering challenges and design decisions involved in preparing KDE Print Manager for the next generation of Linux printing.
Tarun Srivastava has started the work voluntarily in the end of 2024, continued it as Google Summer of Code 2025 project for OpenPrinting (his final report) and is currently working on its completion in the Google Summer of Code 2026. His main mentor is Mike Noe, responsible for the printing support in KDE, and additional mentors are Till Kamppeter, co-founder and lead of OpenPrinting, and Nico Fella.
More about OpenPrinting:
- OpenPrinting News - 25 years of OpenPrinting
- OpenPrinting in Google Summer of Code 2026
- Destination Linux #351 - Till Kamppeter and Michael Sweet
- Tech over Tea #299 - Till Kamppeter (highlight clips)
- FOSDEM 2024 - OpenPrinting - We make printing just work!
Social Links
Mastodon: @till@ubuntu.social
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kamppetertill/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarun-srivastava-4b44b8256/
Biography
Till is leader of OpenPrinting since it was founded in 2001, introduced the CUPS printing system in Mandrake Linux in 2000 working at MandrakeSoft and with this and a lot of evangelism (booths, talks, workshops) made the other distros also switch to CUPS, 2006-2025 printing maintainer at Canonical, 2025-2026 funded by Sovereign Tech Fund, co-organizing annual meetings with the Printer Working Group (PWG), since 2008 every year mentoring in Google Summer of Code, doing everything to make printing on Linux and alike operating systems "just work". Due to the fact that printing goes through several daemons (CUPS, Printer Applications) got a daemon snapper and Snap enthusiast and evangelist. Co-founder and organizer of the Opportunity Open Source conferences in India since 2023. Till is also fellow of the Linux Foundation.
Hi, I am Tarun Srivastava, currently a btech undergrad, I have been working with kde printing development for past 2years and still continuing to do so in this year GSoC. Working for KDE has been a wonderful experience for me and I would recommend other contributors to contribute more to this organisation.
| Headshot Link | https://openprinting.github.io/assets/images/till-kamppeter.jpg |
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