Last night, in April of 2026, I achieved a milestone on my Linux system.
I was able to scan a document and fax it.

This may not sound like much, because I consider both scanning and faxing as hurdles that Linux and even Unix systems have had. divergent serial port wiring, divergent modem commands, archaic GUIs -- it was a nightmare.

In a previous life I had to make Hylafax work with a USRobotics modem attached to one of the octopus cables coming out the back of a DIgiboard installed in an SCO Xenix rig. One of the worst jobs I've ever had, I'm surprised I even remember the equipment in this much detail so long after.

The decline of the tech means the loss of many players, and that means there's pretty well just one standard for fax-modem hardware connections (USB A) and one for the modem commands (still the same old AT... commands). The units cost about $25 and are reliable.
As for the Linux support... I always found SANE to be a nightmare and gave up a number of times trying to make it work over the years, but this week a simple package in the AUR set it up through CUPS on my CachyOS box and now it works great with KDE's Skanpage. As for faxing the scanned document, efax worked quite nicely and was simple to use.

This may sound like a lot of noise about a dying technology, and in many ways it is. But my point here is that this is the kind of thing -- support for niche or specialty hardware and use cases -- in which Linux always lagged so far behind Windows. Now that I have it working, the Linux workflow is far superior to the Window Fax and Scan utility that looks like it hasn't been updated since Windows98.

As for why some federal and provincial government agencies still require one to submit documents by either fax or snail mail, in 2026, don't get me started...)