Canon MF743Cdw without drivers?

I hate printers. I have terrible luck with them. I just had a Brother HL-3180cdw die on me (right after the warranty expired, of course) in a way that will cost more to fix than the printer cost. That had (proprietary) drivers which worked fine with Fedora — not a great experience, but, eh.

I know Canon is not very Linux friendly, but I’m nonetheless tempted by their three-year warranty. Specifically, I’m looking at the MF743Cdw.

Does anyone have experience using this under Linux without installing drivers? That is, using network printing and standard Postcript or PCL or whatever?

What about scanning? Any chance of that working without a driver? (If not, can that be at least controlled directly via the panel on the printer and sent to a Linux-based network share? The Brother printer seemed like it would be able to do this but it didn’t actually work.)

Okay, so, I got this printer and:

  • It works flawlessly out of the box in driverless mode — that is, it’s seen on the network and basic things like two-sided printing can be configured.
  • Many advanced configuration options are available via the http interface, and one can see toner levels there
  • Scanning doesn’t seem to work over the network from Linux, but it’s trivial to set up the printer to save to an FTP or SMB share with scans initiated from the printer. Maybe not ideal for scanning photos, but just fine for documents.
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