One of the easiest, and most frustrating, “services” Google offers is Cloud Print. It’s basically junk. The Internet is full of dreaded printer offline issues and forum posts about it random loss of functionality.
I enjoyed the promise of Cloud Print but it never delivered. I wanted to print to my office or home printers from anywhere. But Cloud Print would drop connections randomly; printers would be offline and require some magic incantation of un-install, reboot, purge Chrome cache, manage devices – across Mac and Linux systems. This was actually one of the easier services to drop.
Like many folks in the “tech” space I’ve got a VPN method into my Home and my Office. This VPN is powered by a Raspberry Pi running OpenVPN. So, simply adding CUPS to this machine and plugging printers in via USB got that part sorted.
It was actually one of the easier Google Services to drop. My frustrations caused by random things breaking has been greatly reduced. Simple and easy.