It's terrible! And when you print to file, you get a driver-dependent file.
Call me impractical, but when I print to file, I kinda expect to be able to view the file or print it somewhere else. Instead I got a bunch of machine code sludge for which no viewer exists, and only a specific printer can print! Everyone else uses postscript...call me crazy, but that makes more sense!
A couple years ago, I wrote about CUPS on vL forum. Boy, I thought that was a pain in the ass. But in retrospect, I understand the rationale for it. You have a daemon that listens for print requests and calls a filter that translates documents to the printer's format. Many printers are so similar, you need only one filter that outputs with minor modifications. CUPS uses ppd files that describes those minor differences. When you install a filter, you usually get ppd files for thousands of printers...you can easily add printers anywhere you go in minutes!
Windows uses drivers and those things usually only work for a specific printer and come with crappy VB software to pollute your workspace and filesystem (and registry)! Why do printers need a kernel-space driver...nobody else does it this way! What are those jerk offs thinking!?
CUPS is elegant, its portable, extensible, and it can use varieties of mediums without much hassle. And surprise, its owned by Apple!
So the story is:
Tomorrow is first day of classes. I was at a friends house and printed my schedule to file on Windows XP and scp'd (he has cygwin) it home. I assumed it was postscript because everything on Unix outputs postscript files when you print to file...quite handy to save paper and keep online payment receipts, tickets, etc...NAH, that would make too much sense! Instead, I got a Lexmark EMF file...its a proprietary format and nothing can read it...and no, its not EMF. It can probably only print to my friend's printer. Now, the database that holds the schedule is offline and I cannot print it again.
Windows: Easy to install, Easy to use, Easy to break, Hard to fix (so hard, companies and products exist to fix it!), and often not reliable!
Unix: Custom to install, Verbose to use, Hard to break, Easy to fix, often very reliable (FreeBSD and Linux hold records on netcraft)!
"They say when you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear satanic messages...but that's nothing, if you play it forward it will install Windows!"
- churchofbsd.org
I indulge in reading John C. Dvorak's PC-MAG columns on annoyances in copying files in Windows. They can't even get that one right, let alone kept computer technology in the DOS era into the 21st century.