this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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My job in the a non technical field relies on a laptop to run a label printer, the laptop is ancient and I already had to install revOS on it so that printing labels isn't horribly bogged down waiting on the laptop to load the simple printer program. Is there anyway that proton would be able to run that program? Probably not because of all lack of driver support, if anyone has any ideas I'm all ear, even just pointing me in a direction would be appreciated!
Proton is really a WINE fork intended specifically for Steam games. Most of the changes in it target games. You may hear a lot about Proton having good compatibility because, historically, games were where WINE tended to have compatibility issues, and Valve put a lot of work into fixing that, so it's more that Proton just improved the situation specifically for games a lot recently.
WINE might be able to run the program, would be what I'd try rather than Proton. You can technically run Proton without Steam, but it's not really designed for that.
Or you might be able to run a Windows VM on newer hardware and run it on that, would be my fallback attempt. Less seamless than just having a Windows program open a window alongside Linux ones, but sometimes that can work if WINE can't do it.
I'd see if Linux can recognize the label printer, if this is a really ancient printer. That'd be my first step. Then look into having Windows apps print to said printer.
Shit lol, I meant wine, I personally use proton for steam so it's stuck in my brain first. Also it's not so much that it's ancient but that it's a commercial printer not really marketeted to the public, but I'll give running the computer on Linux a shot with wine maybe a Linux miracle will happen.
This sounds interesting. What the hell is RevOS? What kind of label maker is that? Does it have a name? Do you know what kind of cable it's using to communicate with the pc?
Yeah it's brand name is kiaro it just uses a usb to connect to the laptop, and revOS is basically just a custom windows install that has as much of the bloatware removed as possible as well as some UI mods to make it feel more like old school windows a little bit. The laptop is from like pre 2010 so Microsoft is slowly killing it's performance with all the bloatware crap. Kinda ridiculous that they don't take older hardware performance very seriously on windows the thing is just trying to run simple GUI printer software and it was struggling hard before revOS.
This is what I think one need to do to test if that would work
If the device is a COM device in windows then I think it should just work out of the box. If not, then the entire device needs to be forwarded using udev rules to wine. Let me know if you want to attempt this :)