EDIT: I purchased the Brother L2690DW on a Clearance deal from Walmart and so far it has been a breeze using it between my Linux desktop and laptop.
My faithful Brother laser printer just poo’d itself. And since I’ve not purchased a new printer with additional features since I switched to full-time Linux, I thought I’d better ask around to make sure the document scanning, copy, fax (maybe once a year if that), and other features will work correctly.
The printer I have no worked without issue with Pop!_OS. Very straight forward plug in play other than a weird quirk with scaling when printing from Firefox built-in PDF handler vs the Document Viewer that ships with Pop.
Does anyone have any advice on potential pitfalls to avoid? I’d like to stick with brother because they seem to be the least evil of the printer corps, but I’m open to other suggestions.
I’ve felt more comfortable with single function devices since there are fewer ways to go wrong.
I would normally agree but then I saw how cool Paperless-NGX is and had a mighty need to self host and get organized. Or at least that’s how I’m justifying it to myself…
No idea about paperless ngx but printer mfgrs generally don’t think about Linux. Instead Linux users buy some specific printers and after years of effort manage to get them working mostly usably. With a multifunction device you want the software to implement 3x the functions at the same time, which sort of cubes the difficulty. It may be even worse since the MFC is an economy product with more flakiness swept under its windows software.
I guess try web searches about the machine you are considering, but I’d be pessimistic. Consider a separate printer and scanner. Those do work if you choose good models. Basically you want commercial and industrial gear, not home office stuff.
I also think document imaging software is good enough now that for light duty use, you can get away with phone camera snaps instead of using a scanner.
I have a Brother MFC-L8900CDW and it works great for printing and scanning on Linux (I use Arch BTW). I use SANE for scanning. You can also set it up to scan to a Samba share or ftp location.
What software do you use? I still haven’t found any good scanning software for Linux.
Any SANE front-end will do. I usually use xsane.
Not really. I’ve tried a lot of scanning apps but they were all grotty. If you scan a lot of documents, decent scanning software is pretty important. You can’t just fiddle around for a few minutes with every page.
I don’t do much scanning, perhaps 5 times a year, and it’s sufficient for my needs. I can definitely see how it leaves gaps if you do a ton of scanning.
I understand that HP is widely regarded as evil but my HP Officejet Pro 8500 does all of this on KDE Neon without even having to install a driver.
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