Yes. Even better, you also get officially supported drivers from the manufacturer.

Sometimes you need them to fully utilize the printer, like my Canon Pixma Pro-100.

Dye sublimation printers is another reason. Gutenprint has great support for those

There have been cases where I needed to install drivers from the manufacturer. Hunting it down from the manufacturer's website is a pain and most importantly, I'd rather avoid installing CrapPrinterBundle.exe [1] from hardware manufacturers if I could avoid it. Gutenprint has been a good alternative in this case.

[1]: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers

Only if printers didn't keep getting progressively worse. All I want is a printer that can instantly print after I power it on, prints nicely with cheap ink, doesn't connect to the internet, and supports driverless printing.

I think stopping binary releases is more than a formality though.

> Does anybody know how many active projects are still left there?

https://sourceforge.net/directory/ shows hundreds of thousands, but I can’t see a good way to filter out inactive projects.

> And who wound up owning them after Slashdot?

https://sourceforge.net/about/leadership appears to indicate that it’s still associated with Slashdot Media. I remember when they were bought that the new owner spent quite a bit of time regaining the trust of the software community. No idea how healthy the company’s business or operations are now, but it’s impressive that they’ve survived this long.

I don’t really know what their USP is anymore. It might be fun to start a new project there just to see what it’s like now.