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
    4·
    2 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
        1·
        2 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
      2·
      2 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
        3·
        2 years ago

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