And to anyone who might think adding or sharing a printer across a network on Linux is challenging, I’ve got news for you… it’s not. Case in point, I had to replace my aging Brother monochrome laser printer that I’ve been using for maybe five years. I opted to go with a similar model, but one without the wireless option that I never used. I pulled the printer out of the box, plugged it in, and clicked Add Printer in the Settings apps. Also: How to easily locate your mouse pointer in Ubuntu and other GNOME-based Linux distributions Pop!_OS found the printer, automatically added the driver, and I was printing within five minutes of unboxing the hardware. But I’m not the only one who needs to use that printer. My wife actually prints more than I do (return labels and knitting patterns seem to be a daily thing in our house), so I had to make the printer available to her Chromebook. Fortunately, this process is incredibly simple on the GNOME desktop, and I’m going to show you how it’s done.
How to easily share a printer from the GNOME desktop
Requirements
To successfully share out a printer this way, you’ll need a running instance of the GNOME desktop, which could be on the Linux distribution of your choice. Also: The best photo printers You’ll also need the printer already connected and working on your local desktop machine. That’s it. Let’s share that printer.
Accessing the printer
When you need to add the printer to another machine on your LAN, all you have to do is type the IP address of your Linux machine and the shared printer will appear in the list. Also: Need a printer? We ranked the the best inkjet, photo, and laser printers In the resulting window, click the checkbox for Publish shared printers connected to this system. Then, click OK. Of course, depending on what operating system you’re adding the printer to, you might have to install drivers. I was able to successfully add this printer to both ChromeOS and MacOS without having to download and install drivers. And that’s all there is to it. I told you it was simple. You can now print to that shared printer from any machine on your LAN (so long as it was successfully added).
