Printers and scanners on Omarchy

Printing on Omarchy is ordinary Arch printing with one large change made in 4.0.2. The stack is installed and running for you. The discovery daemon that used to make network printers appear on their own is gone. So the practical answer is: everything works, but you add each printer once, by hand.

Checked against v4.0.4, released 2026-09-15.

What ships and what does not

The base package set on 4.0.4 contains cups, cups-filters, cups-pk-helper, system-config-printer (the app the launcher calls Print Settings), plus avahi and nss-mdns. The installer enables cups.service and avahi-daemon.service in install/config/enable-services.sh, and the shipped /etc/nsswitch.conf puts mdns_minimal ahead of DNS on the hosts line, so a printer advertising itself as something.local resolves.

Nothing for scanning ships. There is no sane, no sane-airscan, no simple-scan, no ipp-usb and no hplip in the base package list. Scanning is a manual install, covered further down.

Add a printer

1. Press Super + Space and launch Print Settings.
2. Choose Add and give it several seconds. A USB printer that is plugged in and powered on, and most network printers, are found during that probe.
3. If yours is not listed, pick Network Printer > Internet Printing Protocol (ipp) and type the address. Get it from the printer’s front panel or its web interface. It is usually a plain IP with a queue path of ipp/print.
4. Forward offers a driver. The manual’s advice is to leave a modern printer on the driverless IPP Everywhere profile and to give an older one its model driver.
5. Right-click the finished printer and choose Set as Default. Paper size, duplex and print quality are under Properties.

Print Settings asks for your password through polkit when it needs administrator rights. That is cups-pk-helper doing its job.

From a terminal, the same thing needs sudo, because the desktop user’s wheel group is no longer a CUPS SystemGroup:

sudo lpinfo -v
sudo lpadmin -p Office -E -v ipp://192.168.1.50/ipp/print -m everywhere
sudo lpadmin -d Office

Verify it worked

systemctl is-active cups
lpstat -r
lpstat -v
echo "Omarchy test page" | lp -d Office
lpstat -W completed -o

lpstat -r should answer that the scheduler is running, and lpstat -v should list your queue with its device URI. To see what your network is actually advertising, use avahi directly:

avahi-browse -rt _ipp._tcp

One result that looks like a failure is not one. Running lpinfo -v without sudo returns Forbidden. That is the intended 4.0.2 hardening, and the project’s own acceptance test asserts it.

Why discovery is off

Omarchy 4.0.2, released 2026-08-31, lists “Temporarily remove automatic printer discovery” under Deprecations. PR #8951 took cups-browsed out of the default package set and added migration 1788009111, which stops and removes the daemon on machines that already had it, clears idle discovery queues, and leaves manually added IPP and USB printers in place. The same release dropped cups-pdf, because CUPS launched its backend as root and a print job could influence the command that backend ran afterwards, and added cups-pk-helper so printer administration goes through polkit instead of a privileged group.

That is a real behaviour change between point releases. On 3.8.4 and on 4.0.0 and 4.0.1, cups-browsed was installed and enabled, so network printers tended to show up unprompted. From 4.0.2 onward they do not. The hardened discovery configuration still sits in the repository, unused, which is a fair signal that the project intends to bring discovery back rather than drop it for good.

If omarchy update itself failed at this migration rather than after it, there are two known causes: it exits nonzero when the CUPS scheduler is not running (#9377), and it fails on non-English locales because it matches an English lpstat string while LANGUAGE overrides LC_ALL (#9640). Both were still open when this page was checked, the 4.0.4 migration script still only recognises the English No destinations added. message, and the pull request that addressed the stopped-scheduler case (#9406) was closed without being merged on 2026-09-16. Because the migration runner stops at the first failure, a machine hitting either bug also skips every later update step until the migration passes. For the stopped-scheduler case a second reporter on #9377 confirmed a workaround: start cups.socket and cups.service, rerun omarchy update, then stop them again if you do not want CUPS running.

If that did not work

Jobs print one good page then garbage or blanks, on a USB HP printer. Issue #11186 reports exactly this after updating to 4.0.3, printing from Firefox to an HP LaserJet over the hp backend. The reporter first suspected the discovery removal, then isolated it with a single-variable test to a libcupsfilters upgrade from 2.1.1-4 to 2.2.1-2 while cups-filters stayed at 2.0.1-2. Downgrading the library and restarting CUPS fixed it for them. The issue is open and this is a reporter’s finding, not a confirmed upstream diagnosis, so treat it as a lead rather than a rule. If it matches your symptoms, check your versions first with pacman -Q cups-filters libcupsfilters.

Every job fails with universal filter failed or pdftopdf stopped with status 1. That is the driverless profile failing on a printer that is not really an IPP Everywhere device. Issue #11814 covers an HP Smart Tank inkjet where the only offered option was the broken driverless queue. The reporter’s fix was to install hplip and the Gutenprint PPD database, then recreate the queue against an hpcups PPD. hplip is not shipped by default, so this is the general shape of the answer for older or oddball printers: install the vendor driver package, then re-add the printer and pick the model’s own driver at step 4 instead of IPP Everywhere.

No Print to PDF printer. There is not one any more. Use the print dialog’s own Print to File, which every GTK and browser print dialog offers.

Scanning

Nothing scanner related is installed, so start from scratch:

sudo pacman -S sane sane-airscan simple-scan
scanimage -L

sane-airscan is the piece that matters for anything modern. It speaks eSCL and WSD over the network, which is the scanning equivalent of driverless printing, and it means most recent all-in-one devices work without a vendor driver. avahi-daemon is already running, which is what airscan uses to find them. If scanimage -L lists your device, simple-scan will too.

USB-only scanners are less predictable. Device permissions come from the udev rules the sane package installs, and an HP all-in-one generally wants hplip as well. We have not tested a USB scanner on 4.0.4 hardware, and there are no open Omarchy issues about scanning at all, so that part is standard Arch behaviour rather than anything Omarchy specific.

What to watch for on newer versions

The next release is announced as Quattro RS 4.5. Automatic discovery was removed as a temporary measure, and the 4.0.4 tree still carries etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf, a sysusers file for a dedicated cups-browsed account and a locked-down service drop-in, none of which anything installs. That is the strongest hint about what comes next: discovery coming back in a hardened form. If it does, network printers may start appearing on their own again and any queue you added by hand will simply sit alongside them.