What's the current state of printers on Linux? Are there any decent options?
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?
Long story short: if your printer supports IPP Everywhere (it probably does) you don't need drivers or any sort of software other than CUPS.
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.
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.
Yup, network printers work so much easier on Linux than USB printers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've never had problems with Brother printers, but like you that was years ago. Nowadays I rarely print and when I do I do it from my Android on a brother laser printer
I would always go for a laser printer if possible. Also, I believe it's still possible to reset the toner on brother printers via a button combination so that they last twice as long (albeit with lower quality)
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.
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.
Samsung and HP drivers don't work very well on Linux last I heard.
I have a HP printer and it works without a hitch in my experience
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
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 :-)
I had put off for a long time switching distro's because of issues I had historically (like 10 years ago) with printers, setting up cups, jumping through hoops.
However, was forced into it recently after my volume of 3rd party repo's killed my Mint upgrade so switched to Kubuntu. Was honestly dreading the printer side of things.
Went to epson site (I have a cheap xp247 wireless multifunction). grabbed the printer driver, the scanner stuff (all .deb files), installed them
entered the ip of my printer, BOOM.. wireless scanning and printing just like that. Boy, things have really improved since last time i tried to set one up
We have purchased a very cheap Epson EcoTank ET-2815 about a year ago and it has earned its price already. Please note that this printer is for sure not a good Photo-printer, but it is fast and colorful enough for our needs. The printer is really "cheap" in a sense of dubious material (thin plastic) and bad design (e.g. compared to my ancient HP LaserJet). But it has the EcoTank, which means the color refill does not cost very much.
Also on the positive side it did work attached to my Raspi print server, after compiling drivers from epson-inkjet-printer-escpr_1.7.20.tar.gz and adding it with CUPS and the following settings:
We can print from all PCs and mobile devices to it with no issues. Never have tried to scan from Linux with it (it is printer-scanner-copier)
EDIT: Attached to Debian 11 amd64 PC the printer worked with no extra efforts, simply added with CUPS. Only on Raspian 11 the driver was broken and I had to compile my own with source from Epson website.
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
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.
My Pantum P2500W has been seamless across many distros. Its a cheap little laser printer that costs usually sub-$100.
HP printers seem to work and even have dedicated linux software, like a print manager
I have been using a few Brother printers with Linux. They worked well with USB connection and LAN (both ethernet and wifi). Same with the scanning features
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.
Have you documented the steps anywhere?
It was actually plug and play for me after I installed the cups driver from the Canon site for my model LBP6030W https://www.usa.canon.com/support/p/imageclass-lbp6030w
Brother laser printers work great on the network.
Brother printers are plug and play for me.
+1 Once you try Brother printers, you never go back.
+2 WiFi b&w Brother laser with aftermarket toner, haven't looked back.
Definitely. Mine just works immediately without any issues.