Printers and printing on Omarchy

Printing on Omarchy is close to plain Arch with CUPS. The daemon is installed and enabled for you, and the GUI is the standard system-config-printer, which shows up as Print Settings in the launcher. What changed in the 4.x line is discovery: Omarchy 4.0.2 pulled cups-browsed out of the default set, so printers no longer appear on their own.

Everything below was checked against the v4.0.4 source tree and against open issues as of 2026-09-16.

Status on 4.0.4

Verdict: partial. The print stack is present and works, but three things are on you.

• CUPS itself works. cups, cups-filters and cups-pk-helper are in install/omarchy-base.packages, and install/config/enable-services.sh runs systemctl enable cups.service.
• avahi and nss-mdns are installed and avahi-daemon.service is enabled, so mDNS name resolution for network printers is available.
• Automatic discovery is gone. There is no cups-browsed on a 4.0.2 or later machine, and no queues appear by themselves.
• No vendor drivers ship. hplip, gutenprint and the foomatic PPD databases are not in the base package list. Neither is any scanning software: there is no sane, simple-scan or xsane anywhere in the install tree.

If your printer speaks IPP Everywhere or AirPrint, which covers most machines sold in the last decade, you add it once and you are done. If it is an older PCL or PostScript model, or an HP inkjet, you are installing packages by hand.

What Omarchy does automatically

Unlike GPUs or fingerprint readers, printing has no omarchy-hw-* detection script and no install/hardware/ quirk file. Nothing probes your printer at install time. What Omarchy does is limited and worth knowing precisely.

• Installs and enables the stack. CUPS, cups-filters, the Polkit helper, Avahi and nss-mdns, plus system-config-printer as the GUI.
• Uses cups-pk-helper instead of group membership. Migration 1787815267 adds cups-pk-helper because CUPS on Omarchy no longer treats the wheel group as @SYSTEM. You administer printers through Polkit, not by being in lp or sys.
• Dropped cups-pdf. The same migration removes cups-pdf, on the reasoning that its backend runs a job-controlled post-processing command as root and that applications have their own print-to-file. Use your app’s own Print to File or Save as PDF instead of a PDF queue.
• Removed cups-browsed. Migration 1788009111, shipped by PR #8951 in v4.0.2, disables the service, deletes idle implicitclass:// queues that discovery created, leaves queues that still have jobs, and drops the package. PR #8951 says manually added IPP and USB printers are left untouched.
• Protects one config file. install/post-install/pacman.sh reinstalls Omarchy’s cups-files.conf override and deletes the .pacnew that pacman would otherwise leave. See /fix/pacnew-and-pacsave-files-after-update/ for the general pattern.
• Hides two launcher entries. default/omarchy/launcher.hides hides cups and avahi-discover so only Print Settings shows up.

Known problems

The two migrations above are the source of most 4.x printing reports, and the rest are upstream Arch package problems that land on you through omarchy update.

Issue	Models affected	Status	Fixed in
#9377 Migration 1788009111 aborts the whole update when cups.service is stopped	Any machine with CUPS disabled	open	not yet
#9640 Same migration aborts on non-English locales because LC_ALL=C does not translate lpstat	Any non-English system, reported on pt_BR	open	not yet
#11186 Browser print gives one page then PJL garbage and blank sheets	HP LaserJet P2055dn over USB, hplip backend	open	not yet
#11814 Driverless queue fails every job with universal filter failed	HP Smart Tank 520/540 series over USB	open	not yet
#3790 GUI print dialogs hang forever while lp works	Canon MF210 on 3.2.2, reported by several users	workaround	closed by package reinstall, no release fix
#9311 Updates rewrite /etc/nsswitch.conf and put mdns_minimal before files	Anyone using .local hostnames	open	not yet

Two of these deserve detail.

The migration failures (#9377, #9640). omarchy-update runs under set -e and migrations run early, so the abort skips the AUR update, mise update and orphan cleanup that come after. joselberg’s report and the code both show the script only accepts lpstat: No destinations added. as an empty queue list. A stopped scheduler says Scheduler is not running. instead, and a Portuguese system says it in Portuguese. rafaelclima traced that to gettext’s LANGUAGE overriding LC_ALL, and confirmed LC_MESSAGES=C does force English. PR #9406 proposed the one-line fix for the stopped-scheduler half and PR #9650 the locale half. Both were closed unmerged on 2026-09-16 and folded into PR #12101, which covers both cases and is still open. Neither half is fixed in 4.0.4.

The blank-page regression (#11186). This one looks like the cups-browsed removal and is not. docPoacher first blamed the migration, then disproved it with a single-variable test: downgrading libcupsfilters from 2.2.1-2 back to 2.1.1-4 restored correct two-page output while cups-browsed stayed installed. The report is that pacman -Syu pulled libcupsfilters across a major version while cups-filters stayed at 2.0.1-2. Command line lp jobs printed fine in the broken state, which is why it reads as a browser bug.

Fixes that work

Work in this order.

1. Check the daemon. systemctl status cups.service. If it is disabled, enable it before you touch anything else, and before you run omarchy update.
2. Add the queue by hand. Open Print Settings from the launcher and choose Add. The manual FAQ walks through it: USB and most network printers are found by the wizard, and if yours is not, pick Network Printer then Internet Printing Protocol and enter the address, typically the printer’s IP with a queue of ipp/print. Modern printers want the driverless IPP Everywhere profile.
3. If the update stops on the printer migration, give it a running scheduler, following joselberg’s and arkmpm’s workaround: sudo systemctl start cups.socket cups.service, rerun omarchy update, then stop the units again if you want them off. See /fix/migration-failed-mid-update/.
4. If GUI dialogs hang but lp prints, reinstall the CUPS libraries so their versions match. EERomeo’s fix in #3790 was sudo pacman -S cups cups-filters libcups --overwrite='*' followed by sudo systemctl restart cups. daviewales noted this downgraded two packages on their machine, which is the tell that the freeze is a version mismatch.
5. If pages come out blank or full of PJL text, check whether libcupsfilters is 2.2.x while cups-filters is still 2.0.x. docPoacher’s workaround is a downgrade from the pacman cache plus an IgnorePkg pin.
6. For HP hardware, install the vendor stack. HIMANSHU11827’s verified recipe on a Smart Tank 529 installs hplip, gutenprint, foomatic-db-gutenprint-ppds and friends, disables ipp-usb so it stops fighting the kernel usblp driver, then creates the queue with lpadmin against the model’s hpcups PPD. curtisspendlove’s older guide in discussion #250 covers the hp-setup -i route.
7. If .local names stop resolving after an update, that is #9311, not your printer. Reorder files ahead of mdns_minimal in the hosts: line of /etc/nsswitch.conf.

Two gaps to set expectations. There is no built-in print dialog for images: jonnyace opened discussion #10417 and PR #10418 asking for one, and the PR is still open. And scanning is entirely unaddressed by the distribution.

Report it

Printing reports are worth filing because nothing in the hardware scripts covers printers, so issues are the only place the problems get recorded.

Run omarchy debug to collect inxi, dmesg, the boot journal and your full package list into /tmp/omarchy-debug.log. Add --no-sudo to skip dmesg if you would rather not share it. See /reference/commands/omarchy-debug/.

For a printing report specifically, attach these on top of the debug log, because the good reports above all had them:

• pacman -Q cups cups-filters libcupsfilters libcups hplip so the version-mismatch class is visible immediately.
• The device URI from lpstat -v, and the job failure line from /var/log/cups/error_log.
• Your printer’s IEEE-1284 string and USB vendor:product id.
• Whether lp -d <queue> <file> behaves differently from printing in an app. That single comparison is what separated #11186 from a browser bug.

File at github.com/omacom/omarchy/issues, and if your machine’s printer situation is worth recording here, use /hardware/submit/.

Related

• /fix/printer-not-found/
• /fix/migration-failed-mid-update/
• /fix/omarchy-update-fails-or-hangs/
• /switch/printers-and-scanners/
• /releases/v4.0.2/
• /upgrade/3-to-4-quattro/