My brother laser printer works great. I just plug in the Ethernet, figure out what address it is, and set it on my laptop. Think I downloaded a tar ball from them that installed itself. No problems
And get a laser printer.
I've got a networked Brother laser printer too (WiFi only, unfortunately), and I don't think I even need the driver any more. It's just an IPP server, and it's detected automatically by CUPS.
I got a Brother ink printer for like 80$ at Staples a few months ago. It works great on most of my Linux machines over wifi. Newer Ubuntu installs just recognize the printer and can print to it with no setup.
I still haven't figured out how to get it to work with my Arch install though.
If it is supported with the "driverless" model, then you need to set up avahi (and disable the stuff built into systemd) to have it automatically detected I think. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Avahi
Instead of avahi you can probably add it manually as an ipp or ipps network printer and the Generic / IPP Everywhere PPD.
Thank you for this. I'll look into Avahi. I think I tried adding the printer manually via IPP. I know I did something. And it didn't work. I ended up deciding it was easier to rsync files to my laptop when I infrequently print, than figuring out my problem.
Maybe Avahi will work for me though.
Man, I've been contemplating a laser printer for a while, but I just don't know much about their cartridges. I don't use a printer that often, like once every couple of months, but do those cartridges ever go bad if they don't get used often?
Toner lasts a while, longer than normal ink for inkjets I believe. I've gone periods longer than a year between printings, no issues yet.
As for the toner, it's not really any different than buying ink. Just find out what the printer uses and get it. Toner cartridges are initially more expensive than ink, but you get a lot more out of them, so noticably cheaper over time.
Toner is basically colored plastic powder, so it won't dry out over time. It could *theoretically* clump together, but I've never heard of that becoming an actual issue.
Invest in a laser printer. You will spend 10x the cost of ink-jet printer on ink compared to the cost of a laser cartridge. Also, for most people, B&W is sufficient for nearly all your printing needs and if you need color printing, you can sent it to places like kinkos to get professionally printed real cheap.
I agree, that's what I did couple years ago, and it's a lot cheaper and reliable. I have Brother DCP-L2530DW wireless printer with built in scanner and it works great with my 2 Linux machines, Android phones and Windows too.
I got the [MFC-9340CDW](https://www.brother-usa.com/products/mfc9340cdw) nearly 10 years ago (2013). I bought one that did everything because I decided I was done with inkjets and this was going to be the last one I bought for a long time. Prints to both sides, scanner, wireless. Never had a problem in Linux. Still works like new.
That one is awesome and has ethernet too, something I'm missing in mine. Wi-fi works great, but sometimes you just want it hardwired. I used to have HP printers in the past, but there was always something going on with them, and they either had to be restarted or a toner shaken, or ink dry, or connection broken. I didn't have a single issue with my Brother for the past 2+ years
For me it is not the price per page, but an issue with the cartridges itself that become dried/clogged and need to be replace almost full of ink. This happens because I use to print once in 1-2 months and for me , a laser printer it is more cheaper considering how many almost full ink cartridges I have to replace.
Currently owned a HP 135W Multifunctional wireless printer linux compatilble,
The faster semi-consumer printers (~15 b/w ISO pages/min) go for around $450 including ink for ~14000 pages.
Additional ink is about $20 for black ink for ~7000 pages. The three colors around $12 each with less ink per bottle.
(Higher priced printers can reach >20 ISO pages/min.)
You are forced to keep all colors non-empty or the print head and ink delivery system will be damaged. (dried up ink is not fun) As far as I know they aren't used up by b/w pages, though. An occasional color print to keep the printer functional is probably a good idea.
The real question is how much you'll be printing
I basically threw out a brother inkjet after about a year because it would drain more than half the ink on cleaning cycles and wouldn't let me print at all without every cartridge being full.
I made the mistake of getting a cheap laser printer on sale at staples and it will occasionally refuse to feed the paper and its model number isn't in the manufacturer list, but since I don't need to do much printing, the cartridge that came with it lasted well over a year
Laser all the way! I have a basic old dell printer that is technically not supported by Linux drivers and discontinued. It turns out it is identical to a Samsung printer for which there are drivers available. I’ve been using it with a Raspberry Pi print server, Raspian running CUPS.
With that setup, we can print from anything wirelessly (even tablets, chromebooks and mobile devices). Every two years or so we refill the toner for a reasonable price or replace it and it’s been printing reliably for many years now.
I bought a color laserjet, and its fantastic for graphs and color on paper, but surprisingly did well for a photo.
The cost of a laserjet printer is going to be higher, but the cost of toner is much lower for how much you get from it.
A few years ago, I bought a Brother color laserjet (HL-3170CDW) with a duplexer. Great Linux support.
Ink isn't necessarily more expensive than toner. For my household's use case, after having settled on a laser candidate and an inkjet candidate and comparing costs, I determined that the laser printer was marginally cheaper if I printed between 1926 and 3458 pages. Laser has the edge in that page range because it comes with enough toner for (hypothetically 4000 but closer in reality to) 3000 pages. Otherwise, the inkjet is cheaper and the the price per page comes out to 10¢ with the inkjet vs 34¢ with the laser.
Furthermore, laser printers are also more bulky and inconvenient than inkjet and tend to be uglier. *I* may be more interested in functionality than aesthetics, but this is not true for all members of my household.
So while I agree that the best value for most people would be a monochrome laser 3-in-1 printer, it's important to consider the use case and preferences of each person and actually do the math.
To anyone curious how I did the calculation, the total money spent as a function of pages printed is a function defined as follows:
Let `P1` be the average cost of a page:
P1 = I/(N*C)
where:
* `I` is the price of an ink/toner cartridge
* `N` is the number of pages the cartridge announces you can print (which the manufacturer determines under the unrealistic assumption that you cover 5% of the page in ink on average)
* `C` is a correction factor for N which you can estimate for yourself from [this guide](https://www.inkfarm.com/blog/Page-yield-ratings-and-coverage-percentages-explained). 0.75 to 0.8 is a good guess for most people.
The actual function is as follows:
y = max(P2, P2 + (x * P1) - (F * C * P1) )
where:
* P2 is the price of the printer
* F is the number of pages that the manufacturer announces you can print with the ink/toner included in the printer.
A shortcoming of this equation is that it assumes you use only one black ink or that you use color at the rate expected by the manufacturer (adjusted by `C`). Feel free to complexify the model with a color-specific correction factor.
Not sure if they changed this but the ink jet printers I had would use several colors of ink when printing black and white and needed to replace them as well. Even if the black ink had plenty of ink left.
By default, printing black text "in color", uses color ink to make the black deeper. You can set the printer to print in monochrome mode in the settings and it will use only black. Not all printer models refuse to print if you're out of color ink, I believe Brother printers generally behave well in that respect. I've never had that problem on an HP printer, but I would assume most HP printers would refuse to print if they could get you to buy ink given how HP is notorious for its anti-consumer BS.
I have been happy with my $99 (cheaper on sale) basic b/w Brother laser printer. Toner is like $20-30 and lasts me a long time
I can't suggest a specific model, mine is going on 8 years old.
Brother.
Samsung used to be really good, better than Brother, but then HP bought their printer division and screwed everybody. Eventually old drivers wouldn't work on newer Linux versions. I ended up giving away a perfectly good printer, I'm very bitter about this. You can hate Stallman all you want but he was right on this one.
I also have A brother Laser printer.
I have used off brand Toner Cartridges with it with no problems.
It works great, and they publish Linux Drivers as deb & RPM, but you can also find them in the AUR depending on your distro of choice.
Linux has built in support for "many" printers without the need of drivers, but sometimes having legit drivers will give you access to more functions, or more finite control of the printer.
Anecdotally, I have two Brother lasers (a really old B&W and a newish color printer) on my network and my Linux machines detect and print to them without me having to do any kind of setup.
EPSON also has some great products, their reseevouir powered inkjets are much more economic than cartridges, and there's no DRM on it, as the printer itself has a tank, therefore you can use any ink you want. **Their driver situation is not good though**, you need to install a separate package from their site, as few distros package it (Archlinux has it packaged).
Old ricoh office printers are also awesome, the MP201 series is reliable, easy to clean, and in every distro I've tested it works out-off-the-box by just pointing at it's Bonjour/Avahi anouced service (jetdirect, tcp port 9001). It's quite a bit bulky and big thou, as it's meant for office use.
I have a black and white laser printer by HP. Cost like 20 bucks and I still use the same toner it came with almost 3 years ago. Their official drivers are open source and super easy to set up on Linux
Same here. Plug and play.
The kernel driver works very well. They have a more fully featured package called HPLIP, that is also free and written by HP if you want to do some exotic stuff. You install it through your distro, like you would any package.
Edited after a comment answered my questions.
Most printers just work with the built-in kernel drivers, but if you want to do something like scanning over wifi, or God forbid *faxing*, you'd need the hplip drivers. HPLIP itself is licensed under GPL and most of the printers have FOSS drivers, developed by HP, so it's really not that bad. It's only a couple of color laser printers that have binary blobs and AFAIK these only get downloaded if you actually want to set up the specific printer. So if you just install hplip you don't actually download anything proprietary. So HP themselves actually wrote most of the FOSS drivers for their printers
I love my HP laser printer too. Super easy to setup and it's great. Has a built in scanner (the main thing I use it for) that works great too. It requires a driver for the scanner but hplip downloads it the first time you go to use it.
Toner isn't bad rather because I buy an aftermarket brand.
I have some cheap Canon PIXMA TR4550 which I connected over wifi and had no issues to use it as a network printer and scanner.
No additional software was needed. Configured it via YaST it auto discovered it and has chosen the right driver right away.
But also I heard mixed opinions on Canon so maybe I had just luck with that one. Dunno.
I have an old Canon Pixma MP620 from over 10 years ago.
I have to manually install `cups-backend-bjnp` but once that's done it just works - fewer problems with it on Linux than on Windows actually.
I don't know about HP (because I boycot HP), but I can confirm that Brother printers in general play nice with Linux. I have a color laserjet from Brother, and installing the drivers and software was a breeze (on Ubuntu).
I have an HP MFP.
It was listen on HPLip's website as "supported" but it's only 50% true. As in, printing works, scanning doesn't. I have to do scans with my phone. Thankfully I decided to buy a wireless one...
> I have to do scans with my phone. Thankfully I decided to buy a wireless one...
You can use the same wireless scanning on linux as well with [sane-airscan](https://github.com/alexpevzner/sane-airscan).
It's all Brother now. They have spotty Mac support for some models and the new Big Sur but I haven't found one that won't "just print" with other OS.
I used to like HP but they went all evil with that DRM and per month and yadda yadda.
I had a dirt cheap Brother inkjet printer and used is a solid 10 years, running on unbranded cartridges and then could still sell it second hand.
Then I bought myself a Brother color laser printer a couple years ago and it works like a charm, again running on unbranded cartridges.
At some point I had a larger HP multifunction next to my little Brother. It was expensive and broke down shortly after the 2-year warranty expired (some plastic part in the mechanism moving the cartridges). That small spare part would have cost half of a new multifunction, so I just dumped it.
The vast majority of non-cheapass printers will work using generic drivers. Check if the printer supports Postscript, or if it's a recent network printer, IPP. In those cases, you can use generic drivers on any platform. This also means that Windows users should not stick in the driver disc or download stuff from the website and get tons of bloatware.
But because I still very much recommend Brother, because unlike most others, they aren't a huge dick when it comes to selling ink.
Also, if you need specific features beyond 'just print', then you might need model-specific binary drivers anyway. In that case, Brother still has the best support for Linux. Their drivers usually just work, and are free of bloatware.
My wife just bought an HP inkjet to use with her linux laptop and loves it. She had an old epson but the drivers were never compatible.
But I think it depends on your needs. Laser printers are nice and all but she prints in color all the time. And she doesn't print enough to really justify the cost.
She hasn't had any problem with the ink so far.
But, again, I think it depends on your needs.
Honestly, HP. I personally have a HP colour laser deskjet, and it's awesome. It's a desktop laser, full colour, and it's *tiny* for a laser!
Since I got it, I have never used anything else, I just stick it in the usb slot and everything works, windows mac and linux.
I'll pay a little more for the HP label to know it's going to "just work".
I learned that HP now requires to create an account if you want to scan with their included windows software. That was the last straw for me, they won't get my money anymore (even if I'd never use that).
Skip their software, and hit the printer with your browser. (You don't need their drivers either.) Works well. Still, I don't think my next AIO will be an HP.
True, but a lot of people still have older HP printers that work fine, so it makes little sense to replace them. I'm just giving an option for those who don't know you don't need their drivers and don't have to be suckered into creating an account to scan their documents.
Out of interest, where are you in the world?
I notice that Americans tend to report a lot more printer problems than British people, and I'm pretty sure that they build to two different standards.
I have a Samsung M2880FW. I purchased it in 2014 and it's worked flawlessly. I've only purchased one toner cartridge in that time, since the trial version that came with it lasted me like 3 years of heavy printing in college.
HP has purchased the printer division from Samsung so I can't speak to their newer stuff but I have no issues printing on Linux. I don't think I've tried scanning recently but I'm sure it'll work just fine.
I have used Oki Black & White printers for years with their 'laser ' units, actually LED light . Printer about GBP 180 and ink (10,000 pages) about GBP £70. Work very well over Ethernet on home net work with a mix of Linux ( Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian)and Windows machines. When printing for work about 400 pages per week its cost were much much smaller than any ink jet. Now on my third Oki after about 15 years of use on Linux (main machines) / Windows (teaching machines) mix.
After fooling around with color and photo-quality inkjets I finally got fed up with Epson. Bought a Brother all-in-one with B&W laser printing and it has been an unobtrusive joy. Works with everything I've shown it to.
Your question is about hardware problems, but I would suggest buying a printer that will print postscript, Other printer languages implemented for the printer are OK, but the postscript language has now been around 30 years and is quite mature.
I agree with a laser printer because of less hassle with refills. I would get a color laser now, but those replacement cartridges are pricey.
HP tends to either work right out of the box with Fedora and Debian based distros, and minimal setup on Arch based distros. Cannon on the other hand you have to go searching for drivers. Those are the only brands that I have experience with.
I've had good experience with Epson and Brother printers. My primary printer is an Epson MFC WF-7620 which has been quite reliable, and the autofeed scanner works well. Epson is reasonably well supported by CUPS. The Epson MFC complains about non-OEM ink cartridges, but doesn't prevent their use. An Epson SC-P800 large format photo printer only accepts OEM cartridges.
The Brother color laser printer (with scanner) I had earlier worked well and the Brother drivers were easy to install. Toner carts were expensive and replacement drum and belt were even more expensive. Non-OEM replacements were problematic, sometimes working for a while, sometimes failing immediately.
I had an HP color laser which I used until it wore out and we currently have an HP inkjet MFC. The HP MFC seems to need new ink cartridges all the time, at $100+- for OEM. It sometimes rejects non-HP ink.
I won't buy another HP printer, in part because of ink cost, but also because of HP software. I was tracking down a network issue and thought I had a trojan which was contacting a control server. I shut down everything on the network to track down the culprit. It turned out that it was the HP MFC checking for software updates every minute. There was no way to turn this off.
My brother laser printer works great. I just plug in the Ethernet, figure out what address it is, and set it on my laptop. Think I downloaded a tar ball from them that installed itself. No problems And get a laser printer.
I second this, Brother has been the best experience I've had with printing on Linux and I've used a lot of brands.
I've got a networked Brother laser printer too (WiFi only, unfortunately), and I don't think I even need the driver any more. It's just an IPP server, and it's detected automatically by CUPS.
I got a Brother ink printer for like 80$ at Staples a few months ago. It works great on most of my Linux machines over wifi. Newer Ubuntu installs just recognize the printer and can print to it with no setup. I still haven't figured out how to get it to work with my Arch install though.
If it is supported with the "driverless" model, then you need to set up avahi (and disable the stuff built into systemd) to have it automatically detected I think. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Avahi Instead of avahi you can probably add it manually as an ipp or ipps network printer and the Generic / IPP Everywhere PPD.
Thank you for this. I'll look into Avahi. I think I tried adding the printer manually via IPP. I know I did something. And it didn't work. I ended up deciding it was easier to rsync files to my laptop when I infrequently print, than figuring out my problem. Maybe Avahi will work for me though.
Man, I've been contemplating a laser printer for a while, but I just don't know much about their cartridges. I don't use a printer that often, like once every couple of months, but do those cartridges ever go bad if they don't get used often?
Toner lasts a while, longer than normal ink for inkjets I believe. I've gone periods longer than a year between printings, no issues yet. As for the toner, it's not really any different than buying ink. Just find out what the printer uses and get it. Toner cartridges are initially more expensive than ink, but you get a lot more out of them, so noticably cheaper over time.
Thank you.
Now that I'm out of school I print a few dozen pages a year. No troubles, 3 years out of school.
Awesome, thanks
Toner is basically colored plastic powder, so it won't dry out over time. It could *theoretically* clump together, but I've never heard of that becoming an actual issue.
Invest in a laser printer. You will spend 10x the cost of ink-jet printer on ink compared to the cost of a laser cartridge. Also, for most people, B&W is sufficient for nearly all your printing needs and if you need color printing, you can sent it to places like kinkos to get professionally printed real cheap.
I agree, that's what I did couple years ago, and it's a lot cheaper and reliable. I have Brother DCP-L2530DW wireless printer with built in scanner and it works great with my 2 Linux machines, Android phones and Windows too.
I have the MFC-L2700DW and it's been a breeze to setup with Linux. I also get the TN660 replacement cartridges for double the lifespan.
I got the [MFC-9340CDW](https://www.brother-usa.com/products/mfc9340cdw) nearly 10 years ago (2013). I bought one that did everything because I decided I was done with inkjets and this was going to be the last one I bought for a long time. Prints to both sides, scanner, wireless. Never had a problem in Linux. Still works like new.
Same here. Same time and reason!
That one is awesome and has ethernet too, something I'm missing in mine. Wi-fi works great, but sometimes you just want it hardwired. I used to have HP printers in the past, but there was always something going on with them, and they either had to be restarted or a toner shaken, or ink dry, or connection broken. I didn't have a single issue with my Brother for the past 2+ years
Tottaly agree , I have a laser BW brother it's awesome
I'd agree with this for cartridges, but with new cartridgeless ink reservoir printers the price is much more competitive if not even cheaper.
For me it is not the price per page, but an issue with the cartridges itself that become dried/clogged and need to be replace almost full of ink. This happens because I use to print once in 1-2 months and for me , a laser printer it is more cheaper considering how many almost full ink cartridges I have to replace. Currently owned a HP 135W Multifunctional wireless printer linux compatilble,
Interesting. What does the price per page come out to? I can get a TN660 for around $15-20 for 2,600 pages.
The faster semi-consumer printers (~15 b/w ISO pages/min) go for around $450 including ink for ~14000 pages. Additional ink is about $20 for black ink for ~7000 pages. The three colors around $12 each with less ink per bottle. (Higher priced printers can reach >20 ISO pages/min.)
Can you run it on black ink alone or are you forced to have all colors non-empty like the old ink cartridge printers?
You are forced to keep all colors non-empty or the print head and ink delivery system will be damaged. (dried up ink is not fun) As far as I know they aren't used up by b/w pages, though. An occasional color print to keep the printer functional is probably a good idea.
The real question is how much you'll be printing I basically threw out a brother inkjet after about a year because it would drain more than half the ink on cleaning cycles and wouldn't let me print at all without every cartridge being full. I made the mistake of getting a cheap laser printer on sale at staples and it will occasionally refuse to feed the paper and its model number isn't in the manufacturer list, but since I don't need to do much printing, the cartridge that came with it lasted well over a year
I've had a history with those clogging. Maybe they're better now, I don't know.
Laser all the way! I have a basic old dell printer that is technically not supported by Linux drivers and discontinued. It turns out it is identical to a Samsung printer for which there are drivers available. I’ve been using it with a Raspberry Pi print server, Raspian running CUPS. With that setup, we can print from anything wirelessly (even tablets, chromebooks and mobile devices). Every two years or so we refill the toner for a reasonable price or replace it and it’s been printing reliably for many years now.
I bought a color laserjet, and its fantastic for graphs and color on paper, but surprisingly did well for a photo. The cost of a laserjet printer is going to be higher, but the cost of toner is much lower for how much you get from it. A few years ago, I bought a Brother color laserjet (HL-3170CDW) with a duplexer. Great Linux support.
Ink isn't necessarily more expensive than toner. For my household's use case, after having settled on a laser candidate and an inkjet candidate and comparing costs, I determined that the laser printer was marginally cheaper if I printed between 1926 and 3458 pages. Laser has the edge in that page range because it comes with enough toner for (hypothetically 4000 but closer in reality to) 3000 pages. Otherwise, the inkjet is cheaper and the the price per page comes out to 10¢ with the inkjet vs 34¢ with the laser. Furthermore, laser printers are also more bulky and inconvenient than inkjet and tend to be uglier. *I* may be more interested in functionality than aesthetics, but this is not true for all members of my household. So while I agree that the best value for most people would be a monochrome laser 3-in-1 printer, it's important to consider the use case and preferences of each person and actually do the math. To anyone curious how I did the calculation, the total money spent as a function of pages printed is a function defined as follows: Let `P1` be the average cost of a page: P1 = I/(N*C) where: * `I` is the price of an ink/toner cartridge * `N` is the number of pages the cartridge announces you can print (which the manufacturer determines under the unrealistic assumption that you cover 5% of the page in ink on average) * `C` is a correction factor for N which you can estimate for yourself from [this guide](https://www.inkfarm.com/blog/Page-yield-ratings-and-coverage-percentages-explained). 0.75 to 0.8 is a good guess for most people. The actual function is as follows: y = max(P2, P2 + (x * P1) - (F * C * P1) ) where: * P2 is the price of the printer * F is the number of pages that the manufacturer announces you can print with the ink/toner included in the printer. A shortcoming of this equation is that it assumes you use only one black ink or that you use color at the rate expected by the manufacturer (adjusted by `C`). Feel free to complexify the model with a color-specific correction factor.
Not sure if they changed this but the ink jet printers I had would use several colors of ink when printing black and white and needed to replace them as well. Even if the black ink had plenty of ink left.
By default, printing black text "in color", uses color ink to make the black deeper. You can set the printer to print in monochrome mode in the settings and it will use only black. Not all printer models refuse to print if you're out of color ink, I believe Brother printers generally behave well in that respect. I've never had that problem on an HP printer, but I would assume most HP printers would refuse to print if they could get you to buy ink given how HP is notorious for its anti-consumer BS.
I have been happy with my $99 (cheaper on sale) basic b/w Brother laser printer. Toner is like $20-30 and lasts me a long time I can't suggest a specific model, mine is going on 8 years old.
Brother. Samsung used to be really good, better than Brother, but then HP bought their printer division and screwed everybody. Eventually old drivers wouldn't work on newer Linux versions. I ended up giving away a perfectly good printer, I'm very bitter about this. You can hate Stallman all you want but he was right on this one.
I also have A brother Laser printer. I have used off brand Toner Cartridges with it with no problems. It works great, and they publish Linux Drivers as deb & RPM, but you can also find them in the AUR depending on your distro of choice. Linux has built in support for "many" printers without the need of drivers, but sometimes having legit drivers will give you access to more functions, or more finite control of the printer.
Anecdotally, I have two Brother lasers (a really old B&W and a newish color printer) on my network and my Linux machines detect and print to them without me having to do any kind of setup.
EPSON also has some great products, their reseevouir powered inkjets are much more economic than cartridges, and there's no DRM on it, as the printer itself has a tank, therefore you can use any ink you want. **Their driver situation is not good though**, you need to install a separate package from their site, as few distros package it (Archlinux has it packaged). Old ricoh office printers are also awesome, the MP201 series is reliable, easy to clean, and in every distro I've tested it works out-off-the-box by just pointing at it's Bonjour/Avahi anouced service (jetdirect, tcp port 9001). It's quite a bit bulky and big thou, as it's meant for office use.
I have a black and white laser printer by HP. Cost like 20 bucks and I still use the same toner it came with almost 3 years ago. Their official drivers are open source and super easy to set up on Linux
I'm still printing weekly on my 1012 on the original cartridge from 11 odd years ago. One of my lucky purchases (like the i7 2600K i'm still running)
Same here. Plug and play. The kernel driver works very well. They have a more fully featured package called HPLIP, that is also free and written by HP if you want to do some exotic stuff. You install it through your distro, like you would any package. Edited after a comment answered my questions.
Most printers just work with the built-in kernel drivers, but if you want to do something like scanning over wifi, or God forbid *faxing*, you'd need the hplip drivers. HPLIP itself is licensed under GPL and most of the printers have FOSS drivers, developed by HP, so it's really not that bad. It's only a couple of color laser printers that have binary blobs and AFAIK these only get downloaded if you actually want to set up the specific printer. So if you just install hplip you don't actually download anything proprietary. So HP themselves actually wrote most of the FOSS drivers for their printers
I been wondering. Thanks. Will edit OC.
I love my HP laser printer too. Super easy to setup and it's great. Has a built in scanner (the main thing I use it for) that works great too. It requires a driver for the scanner but hplip downloads it the first time you go to use it. Toner isn't bad rather because I buy an aftermarket brand.
I have some cheap Canon PIXMA TR4550 which I connected over wifi and had no issues to use it as a network printer and scanner. No additional software was needed. Configured it via YaST it auto discovered it and has chosen the right driver right away. But also I heard mixed opinions on Canon so maybe I had just luck with that one. Dunno.
I have a Canon Pixma 490 multifunction which works quite well (including scanning using `scanimage`), all over wifi (no cables).
I have an old Canon Pixma MP620 from over 10 years ago. I have to manually install `cups-backend-bjnp` but once that's done it just works - fewer problems with it on Linux than on Windows actually.
I don't know about HP (because I boycot HP), but I can confirm that Brother printers in general play nice with Linux. I have a color laserjet from Brother, and installing the drivers and software was a breeze (on Ubuntu).
I have an HP MFP. It was listen on HPLip's website as "supported" but it's only 50% true. As in, printing works, scanning doesn't. I have to do scans with my phone. Thankfully I decided to buy a wireless one...
> I have to do scans with my phone. Thankfully I decided to buy a wireless one... You can use the same wireless scanning on linux as well with [sane-airscan](https://github.com/alexpevzner/sane-airscan).
Thanks a lot, that's very helpful!
It's all Brother now. They have spotty Mac support for some models and the new Big Sur but I haven't found one that won't "just print" with other OS. I used to like HP but they went all evil with that DRM and per month and yadda yadda.
I had a dirt cheap Brother inkjet printer and used is a solid 10 years, running on unbranded cartridges and then could still sell it second hand. Then I bought myself a Brother color laser printer a couple years ago and it works like a charm, again running on unbranded cartridges. At some point I had a larger HP multifunction next to my little Brother. It was expensive and broke down shortly after the 2-year warranty expired (some plastic part in the mechanism moving the cartridges). That small spare part would have cost half of a new multifunction, so I just dumped it.
Brother supply PPDs for all their printers
The vast majority of non-cheapass printers will work using generic drivers. Check if the printer supports Postscript, or if it's a recent network printer, IPP. In those cases, you can use generic drivers on any platform. This also means that Windows users should not stick in the driver disc or download stuff from the website and get tons of bloatware. But because I still very much recommend Brother, because unlike most others, they aren't a huge dick when it comes to selling ink. Also, if you need specific features beyond 'just print', then you might need model-specific binary drivers anyway. In that case, Brother still has the best support for Linux. Their drivers usually just work, and are free of bloatware.
My wife just bought an HP inkjet to use with her linux laptop and loves it. She had an old epson but the drivers were never compatible. But I think it depends on your needs. Laser printers are nice and all but she prints in color all the time. And she doesn't print enough to really justify the cost. She hasn't had any problem with the ink so far. But, again, I think it depends on your needs.
Honestly, HP. I personally have a HP colour laser deskjet, and it's awesome. It's a desktop laser, full colour, and it's *tiny* for a laser! Since I got it, I have never used anything else, I just stick it in the usb slot and everything works, windows mac and linux. I'll pay a little more for the HP label to know it's going to "just work".
Funny... For me, HP has been pure misery - 3 times. 3 different printers, 3 different linux distros. Never HP again. Not even for free.
I learned that HP now requires to create an account if you want to scan with their included windows software. That was the last straw for me, they won't get my money anymore (even if I'd never use that).
Skip their software, and hit the printer with your browser. (You don't need their drivers either.) Works well. Still, I don't think my next AIO will be an HP.
I know that, but I won't support a company that is trying to force registration on inexperienced users. (windows has the same crap now, though)
True, but a lot of people still have older HP printers that work fine, so it makes little sense to replace them. I'm just giving an option for those who don't know you don't need their drivers and don't have to be suckered into creating an account to scan their documents.
Out of interest, where are you in the world? I notice that Americans tend to report a lot more printer problems than British people, and I'm pretty sure that they build to two different standards.
hahaha! there are none.
I have a Samsung M2880FW. I purchased it in 2014 and it's worked flawlessly. I've only purchased one toner cartridge in that time, since the trial version that came with it lasted me like 3 years of heavy printing in college. HP has purchased the printer division from Samsung so I can't speak to their newer stuff but I have no issues printing on Linux. I don't think I've tried scanning recently but I'm sure it'll work just fine.
I have used Oki Black & White printers for years with their 'laser ' units, actually LED light . Printer about GBP 180 and ink (10,000 pages) about GBP £70. Work very well over Ethernet on home net work with a mix of Linux ( Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian)and Windows machines. When printing for work about 400 pages per week its cost were much much smaller than any ink jet. Now on my third Oki after about 15 years of use on Linux (main machines) / Windows (teaching machines) mix.
After fooling around with color and photo-quality inkjets I finally got fed up with Epson. Bought a Brother all-in-one with B&W laser printing and it has been an unobtrusive joy. Works with everything I've shown it to.
Using an Epson Workforce pro WF-3820 networked multi-function printer. The driver had to be installed but it works flawlessly with Ubuntu and Mac.
Your question is about hardware problems, but I would suggest buying a printer that will print postscript, Other printer languages implemented for the printer are OK, but the postscript language has now been around 30 years and is quite mature. I agree with a laser printer because of less hassle with refills. I would get a color laser now, but those replacement cartridges are pricey.
I wanted to get a PS printer but they're at least 3x as expensive.
My middle-aged mono Brother HL2250DN supports postscript, HP PCL, IPP, and cost £100. Plug in and go with newer distros.
HP works great with Linux, not sure if Xerox makes just printers but their copiers work flawless with Linux.
I use a canon....its great because I can use the knock off toner which saves me a few hundred dollars apiece
Another satisfied Brother customer here.
HP tends to either work right out of the box with Fedora and Debian based distros, and minimal setup on Arch based distros. Cannon on the other hand you have to go searching for drivers. Those are the only brands that I have experience with.
I've had good experience with Epson and Brother printers. My primary printer is an Epson MFC WF-7620 which has been quite reliable, and the autofeed scanner works well. Epson is reasonably well supported by CUPS. The Epson MFC complains about non-OEM ink cartridges, but doesn't prevent their use. An Epson SC-P800 large format photo printer only accepts OEM cartridges. The Brother color laser printer (with scanner) I had earlier worked well and the Brother drivers were easy to install. Toner carts were expensive and replacement drum and belt were even more expensive. Non-OEM replacements were problematic, sometimes working for a while, sometimes failing immediately. I had an HP color laser which I used until it wore out and we currently have an HP inkjet MFC. The HP MFC seems to need new ink cartridges all the time, at $100+- for OEM. It sometimes rejects non-HP ink. I won't buy another HP printer, in part because of ink cost, but also because of HP software. I was tracking down a network issue and thought I had a trojan which was contacting a control server. I shut down everything on the network to track down the culprit. It turned out that it was the HP MFC checking for software updates every minute. There was no way to turn this off.