Years ago, Brother printers seemed to be one of the few feasible options. What’s the printer landscape like today? Are there any plug and play options that aren’t part of some ink scam?

  • derek@lemmy.one
    0·
    3 years ago

    Afaik, most of them are supported. Haven’t had any problems with a printer in linux. Linux uses CUPS and CUPS is made by apple, so, I thought, most of printers are supported by it.

    And you could also search for drivers on manufacturer’s page, there’ll be linux version.

      • derek@lemmy.one
        0·
        3 years ago

        Hm, I was thinking opposite about HP, because there’s hplib or something like that for Linux, that is made by UP and stays in a tray. Not exactly sure, because I don’t have HP printer anymore, but that was a thing like 5yrs ago

    • Billy_Gnosis@beehaw.org
      0·
      3 years ago

      This has been my experience as well. I use Linux Mint Cinnamon and two Canon PIXMA printers. One large format and one printer/scanner. Canon does not have any Linux drivers on their website, but they were recognized and supported when they were plugged in. Pretty much plug and play

      One thing I’ve noticed though is that the CUPS drivers seem to be the bare minimum. You can’t do things like see ink levels and the color/brightness levels are off by quite a bit. A lot of times It takes a lot of tweaking to get colors accurate that for a lot of my photos, I just fire up the windows machine and print them from there

      • derek@lemmy.one
        0·
        3 years ago

        You could also use USB forwarding in Virtualbox and qemu to do this without rebooting your machine :-)

  • curioushom@lemmy.one
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    3 years ago

    I recently bought a cheap Canon laser printer and it worked great over USB and CUPS. I setup wifi printing through a windows VM and now wifi printing also works in Linux over CUPS. It was way less painful than I had anticipated.

  • ByteSeb@beehaw.org
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    3 years ago

    Well, I’ve used multiple Epson and even a HP WiFi printer. And all of them worked perfectly. Way better than on Windows. In the worst cases, I had to choose the driver from a list and that’s it. In some instances, I even have ink level indicators, and options to clean the printer. It’s really cool

  • NeonRaspberry@lemmy.ml
    0·
    3 years ago

    I have two Brother printers at home that worked perfectly, out of the box. All I had to do was install and enable CUPS, which AFAIK should be done on a number of mainstream distros already. You really can’t go wrong with Brother on Linux.

  • synthllama
    0·
    3 years ago

    If it’s a network printer and it lists Postscript and/or PCL6 support on its specs it should be good for at least basic printing. I still use my Brother laser though, haven’t needed to replace it yet.

    • davefischer@beehaw.org
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      3 years ago

      I have no idea if this is common, but the HP I have supports both postscript and PDF (and PCL-something), which makes my life much easier.

  • BillTheTailor@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    All inkjet printers are an ink scam. If you don’t need color, or need it infrequently, get a b/w laser printer and be done with it. I bought a used HP Laserjet 2430 back with Ubuntu 18 and never looked back. I print a lot, and just a month ago broke into a toner cartridge I bought five years ago.

  • pitl
    0·
    3 years ago

    I have to regularly use HP, Brother, and Epson wireless printers with my laptop, and they’ve all worked via CUPS with no tinkering that I can recall. In one of the cases (the Epson WF-3720) the available settings and indicators were very limited, but beyond that no issues.

    • luchs@feddit.de
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      3 years ago

      This is the correct answer. IPP Everywhere support is often advertised as AirPrint and sometimes as Mopria, which all means that it will work with CUPS without extra drivers.

      In fact, with the upcoming version 3, CUPS will drop direct support for non-IPP printers.

  • Joe@lemmy.knocknet.net
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    3 years ago

    My partner’s crappy HP all in one that charges insane prices for ink seems to work fine whenever I rarely have to use it.

  • lalay721@feddit.it
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    3 years ago

    I have an HP LaserJet P1005 from 15 years ago which mostly works fine with Hplip except that every once in a while it asks me to reinstall the proprietary plugin needed. I’m taking note of how other brands seem to work better but to be honest I print so little since I digitally sign everything that once I run out of toner it’s far cheaper for me to have something printed in a shop than to replace it.

  • theonlykl@partizle.com
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    3 years ago

    My Pantum P2500W has been seamless across many distros. Its a cheap little laser printer that costs usually sub-$100.