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?
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?
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.
IIRC CUPS started independently and then apple employed the main dev. After a few years he then left apple and forked his own project under the Linux Foundation, which is now the “proper” upstream
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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
You could also use USB forwarding in Virtualbox and qemu to do this without rebooting your machine :-)
Samsung and HP drivers don’t work very well on Linux last I heard.
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
I have a HP printer and it works without a hitch in my experience