i need some help buying a monochrome laser printer with scanning that supports linux, plug and play is a nice thing to have.
🖨️ my available brands are : Epson, cannon and brother
❌ no need for WiFi, fax ,ect
i need some help buying a monochrome laser printer with scanning that supports linux, plug and play is a nice thing to have.
🖨️ my available brands are : Epson, cannon and brother
❌ no need for WiFi, fax ,ect
honestly, laser is laser, higher prices are usually stuffs like, integrated scan or bigger paper capacity, mostly added features rather than print quality.
For the plug and play, you probably are still going to have to pick a driver during installation, most of the time, drivers for older model the same class of printer will work
fake ex: PAPERLOVE CFG-3420D will work fif you have a PAPERLOVE CFG-3520D
the reason i don’t want to install drivers is the automatic forced updates, you know the kind that HP does to break their printer, i have got into linux to get away from that shit not to go back to it
I think hp and windows rotted the way you view drivers, what I call drivers are just what your computer use to communicate with devices, they aren’t software suite that updates and ask for your account, drivers are like 2kb text files with a index of available function and what signal to sent to the printer for it to print, what you see as drivers is the heavy and predatory spyware they ship with printer to steal your data and make you spend more miney, when you install a printer on linux (especially brother) you are just getting the little file with the printer’s language, depending on your distro, it will give you a big ass list of available drivers to use with the printer you just connected, it won’t ever ask you to update or even try to communicate with the internet, since it’s a passive file that your computer use and not a program that is launched, those files are available on windows btw, the manufacturers just make them very hard to get for obvious reasons, and windows itself will install the spyware as if it’s a driver through windows update, one of the many reason I fucked off of it
Also, to be fair, HP has download link to windows drivers only but they heavily push the windows crapware suite download links on their site.
They probably do but I have a vague work memory of a model of personal printer that forced me to go look through the driverstore folder of another computer with the spyware installed because they didn’t offer anything else but their program which couldn’t be launched in the env I had to do it in
Yeah, only their “professional” lines are ok.
You always need a driver. What you don’t want is a driver that’s malware. Brother is the best brand in that regard, but unfortunately becoming worse too.
Printing itself is doomed to enshitification since any non-shit new project about it is met with the usual “why bother, we as a world need to stop printing anyway”