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.
My brother behaves weird with Linux (fedora 39 silverblue).
When doing multiple copies of double sided printing, it’ll print [1|2] [1|1] [2|2] [1|1] [2|2] and then repeat until you realise you now have onen copy of what you want and 10 pages of one side, and 10 pages of the other side.
It’ll also randomly refuse jobs, and then print them 30 minutes later (lmao if you printed multiple copies, gave up and went for a walk)
My Panasonic I replaced it with was better, but you had to download binary blobs to make it work.
But, Linux has gotten more and more complicated in the last 20 years I really can’t be fucked working out if it’s the printer, cups, flatpacks, the app that’s printing, or all of the above.
Now I just email myself a PDF and print from my phone. Fucking stupid but it works.