Huh. I print less and less since college, but it honestly hadn't occurred to me that you might be a desktop Linux user who just doesn't print anything.

> There at printers that let you send a pdf directly to their ip address, ones that take in usbs, etc...

> As another thought, why does it come by default on most distros given its history?

I assume because people who do much printing definitely want to print in a 'normal', way, directly from applications. Isn't CUPS the only game in town there? That adds up to a lot of inertia. CUPS is mature and featureful and has been around for a long time, plus is integrated with the rest of the stack and all the applications, and it has no direct competitors on those platforms, as far as I'm aware.

Maybe Red Hat would be interested in producing a CUPS replacement, but they may also feel like for Fedora users and desktop users of Red Hat, SELinux and occasional emergency patches is good enough for what is ultimately not their core audience, as well as a hell of a lot cheaper and more politically feasible than a from-scratch rewrite. Idk who else would likely be interested in funding such a project.

Most distros are made by some high schooler as a weekend project. Fork Ubuntu, add some wacky experimental GUI, done.

And the distros that aren't like that are made by big corporations who only care about securing servers and kiosks, home desktops really aren't their concern.