Isn't cups a de facto apple project? What's the VM getting you?

The gutenprint drivers to support the specific printer don't support darwin

Gutenprint supports macos as a first class citizen, including this particular printer AFAICT.

From the Gutenprint home page, https://gimp-print.sourceforge.io/:

As of July 7, 2024 the Gutenprint project has formally deprecated MacOS support. This means that no further MacOS-compatible binaries will be produced.

Gutenprint has not had an active MacOS maintainer for over three years, and the remaining developers lack the technical ability to produce MacOS binaries, much less undertake the substantial amount of work necessary to produce, test, and support binaries on newer (post-Mojave/10.14) MacOS releases.

It looks like it's just because they had no way to test, and bandwidth to deal with it. But should still mostly work, once whatever issue (that sounds like app notrization) is fixed.

It seems like the better option would have been to fix whatever was blocking them just two years ago, rather than this wild rube goldberg machine of a Linux VM emulated in a browser tab.

I mean, anyone is welcome to do just that! But I guess coding Rube Goldberg machines in JS (to push the boundaries of the web) is a thing I really kind of enjoy.

No. Most cups changes nowadays happen in https://github.com/openprinting/cups?tab=readme-ov-file

See here for the details: https://openprinting.github.io/achievements/#cups-upstream-h...

Oh, OK, new information, thanks!

But this driver is older than OpenPrinting's fork from Apple CUPS.