On Thu, 19 Mar 2020 14:06:34 -0400
Snidely Whiplash <therealgrogan@gmail.com> wrote:
> You can't completely remove CUPS on a Linux distribution, because it's a
> hard dependency for a lot of things.
General-purpose binary distros fold CUPS in and include support for it in
everything because they want to be a "plug-and-play" experience for people
who know nothing about Linux. Linux without CUPS, however, is certainly
possible--the Pi3 blinking happily to itself above my desk has never had
CUPS installed, because it doesn't need it in order to fulfill its role.
It depends what packages you install from a distribution of course. I meant in context of desktop usage. Any desktop environment you install from distro packages is likely to have Cups libraries as a dependency. Similarly for software like LibreOffice (I compile my own and have to pass --disable-cups on this system.)