I don’t remember the last time I used a printer, let alone owned one (does that make me weird?), but I do remember printer ink running out mid-job being a major frustration.
I’d queue up a multi-page print job only to find half of them came out with streaky, faded text because the cartridge was running on fumes (and would say running on fumes since, in terms of price per volume, printer ink is more expensive than gold).
My penny-pinching aside, the underlying irritation is something KDE developers will address in the next major update to the Plasma desktop environment.
KDE Plasma 6.5 is in development and will, among other planned changes, bring a small change to alert you when your printer is low on ink. The code-commit suggest the threshold is set for either at or below 3%.
CUPS (Common Unix Printing System, which is used by most Linux distributions to handle and interface with printers) checks ink marker levels and stores marker-levels values in a printers.conf file.
By way of some tweaks and API modernisations, the print system in KDE Plasma 6.5 now checks these levels when a print job is created or finished, and sends a desktop alert if ink levels are below the set threshold.
When initiating a print job, knowing printer ink is low means you can decide whether to continue to print at all (there’s no point sending a 15 page job if it’s not going to cope); while finding out ink is low after a print job complete will remind you to order some more.
A modest change, much like the KDE rounded window corners change I reported on last week.
But unlike corner radii, this tackles a practical pain point, rather than an aesthetic niggle. Yet both changes underscore KDE’s attention to making the desktop experience one that is accommodating.
It’s not the only printer-related tweak coming in Plasma 6.5, with the desktop displaying more informative error messages if print service is currently disabled or has failed to start.