Bad experience because of missing HP printer drivers

Hello everyone,
today i sadly made a subpar experience with Fedora 35 while trying to print. The printer in question is the HP Color Laser MFP 178nwg. The issue was that there were no drivers, not even from the RPM Fusion repo as it seems.
So I had to get the drivers from HP’s website and install them as root. It is not reasonable to expect a normal user to do this and teach them to run a script from the web (or here from HP’s website) as root.
I thought maybe someone from Fedora can convince HP to host their drivers on RPM Fusion. This way we can have a better experience on Fedora and users are not thought that running scripts from the web as root is normal.

From what I know, hplip is the supported way of setting up HP hardware on Linux. It is included in the Fedora repositories so users do not need to go to the HP website and install drivers manually. hplip also includes a GUI which will download the install the correct driver for your HP hardware:

More information here:

https://www.openprinting.org/driver/hplip/

According to this databse, my printer model/series (HP Color Laser MFP 178nwg) is not supported by the HPLIP package. That is why I had to download the drivers from HP’s website.
Because if it was supported by HPLIP, should it not have been automatically handled by the OS? (at least my experience with a different HP printer model)

I’m not sure. With my printer, even though it was detected by the printer config, I think I had to run hplip to install the HP ppd files to make sure all features worked. It’s been a while since I installed my printers though, so I could be misremembering.

If it isn’t supported by hplip, I’m not sure if there’s a way other than downloading drivers from the HP website. That’s just how it needs to be done on all OSes, not just Fedora/Linux.

Well on Windows it just works (automatically detects printer and installs needed drivers). It is way less scarier then installing a driver through the terminal without a manual.
So I hoped someone important at Fedora, that HP might listen to, could convince HP to host their drivers on the RPM Fusion repo. This way installation of the drivers can be done through GNOME Software, especially since Fedora prompted me at printer setup to do that anyway (it was just not finding any drivers).