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.
Brother has good support for Linux, but scanning over the network still requires a closed source driver. No driver is needed for printing on most of the recent Brother printers.
I’m pretty sure my computer doesn’t even know my Brother multifunction has a scanner at all. Printing requires a driver, but scanning (initiated from the scanner) requires nothing more from the computer than an FTP server or shared drive. (Okay, and a web browser for accessing the device’s web-based configuration page.)
I didn’t need to install any drivers for network scanning on my brother printer. Just shows up in gnome simple scan automatically.
They must have improved it then. Networks scanning used to require the brscan package to work.