Ideally I am looking for a printer with
- opensource - Hardware, firmware, drivers, All OS support,
- No Shenanigans like mixing up colors, wasting ink in storage, hidden codes
- Easy to maintain and repair,
- low ink cost
- No Wifi or bluetooth
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Brother HL-L2310D, super basic black-and-white laser. USB only, no Wi-Fi junk, no “phone app required” crap. Just stick it in, install drivers, and it spits out pages. Toner is cheap and it doesn’t freak out when you don’t use it for a week.
Brother HL-L2370DN, same deal but with wired LAN if you want to share it on a network. Still no Wi-Fi/Bluetooth nonsense. Nice solid little workhorse, prints fast, simple guts, cheap toner, none of that overhyped smart printer fluff.
Brother
Are their drivers open source?
EDIT: I guess you dont need the official drivers https://wiki.debian.org/Brother
I’ve never installed a manufacturer’s driver for my brother printer across distributions. Even live USB images can print to it with no trouble.
It just depends on the model. Some of them refuse to do anything or just dont scan for example if you dont use the official driver.
I bet it’s more complicated for those multi function machines.
These are by far the best recommendations; I second.
I am having an impossible time finding “N” (network) models in most consumer stores. It seems that they have all been replaced by “W” (wireless) models.
How perfect is it ? What is the Catch here ?
1 .opensource - Hardware, firmware, drivers, All OS support, 2. No Shenanigans like mixing up colors, wasting ink in storage, hidden codes 3. Easy to maintain and repair, 4. low ink cost 5. No Wifi or bluetooth
Brother HL-1212w fully FOSS USB only monochrome laser. If you have a router with USB and openwrt installed you can share the printer over the network. Cheap old printer but works great for just printing.
My experience with a LAN/USB brother printer/scanner helped me forget my HP nightmares, they have drivers for Linux althought Linux recognizes it and uses it without issue or their drivers, and still got a firmware update the other day after more than 10 (i think) years that I have it. Model DCP-L2540DN.
