They may be digital natives, but young workers were raised on user-friendly apps – and office devices are far less intuitive

If your scanner works on your phone and you have a Linux desktop, you should be able to drive it from your Linux desktop. The Document Scanner app from the Gnome project (Debian package name: simple-scan) is pretty good.

If your desktop doesn’t see the scanner on the network, you can try connecting it by USB and using the ipp-usb program, which publishes it on the local Avahi daemon where Document Scanner will look for it.

Personally, I’d only ever connect it by USB anyway. Network-attached printers/scanners tend to be horribly insecure. Although many of those vulnerabilities can also be exploited through a Linux print/scan server as well, so this isn’t an airtight solution either. Really, the best thing you can do for the security of your network is to not have any printers or scanners anywhere near it.

When the poster says “I often just use Photoscan on my phone” what they mean is “instead of dealing with the physical scanner at all I often use an app on my phone that takes a picture of a document with the phone’s camera, flattens out the image in software, and leaves me with a pdf the same as if the scanner were doing its job”.

That is, the scanner doesn’t “work on the phone”, but these days phone cameras and automatic image processing programs are so good actual scanners can often be bypassed.

Create a post

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

  • 1 user online
  • 81 users / day
  • 252 users / week
  • 578 users / month
  • 2.24K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 3.35K Posts
  • 67.5K Comments
  • Modlog