After my Canon LBP 3300 stopped working recently and attempts to fix the problem failed I am considering selling it off and purchasing a new laser printer.
From what I can tell, CUPS is moving towards IPP as the main way of communicating with printers. When adding the existing printer with lpadmin, it now says:
lpadmin: Printer drivers are deprecated and will stop working in a future version of CUPS.
So what printer should I choose that will survive updates to CUPS?
I prefer Canon or HP from a reliability standpoint. I see that the HP drivers (hplip) are available in the Fedora repo. Does this mean the HP would have a better chance of remaining compatible for the life of the printer?
Canon only provide their proprietary CAPT drivers and do not provide any support for Linux. So I guess they are crossed off the list.
And when I say “life” of the printer, I am talking possible 10+ years., as that is what I got from the LBP3300.
Please give me some clues on how to pick the right laser printer to survive the future of Fedora (if possible).
My sample size is too small to be meaningful as a recommendation.
I’ve had good luck with a basic Brother laser printer (HL-2040, non-networked, USB) for years in terms of reliability, and it’s still in use. I’ve also had HP multifunction printers (inkjet L7700, and laserjet 3330) that have been frustrating, with the automatic document feeder dying and weird behavior of the scanner bulb. For purely the printing aspect, laser printers generally have been reliable.
hplip is great in terms of the rich feature set that seems unrivaled. Most printers, HP or Brother, have been automatically detected in linux if they were local or network printers. The trouble for me has been with shared printers connected locally to Windows machines.
Still, I’ve found setting up most printers in linux can be annoying if the automatic setup fails for any reason. Aside from setup sometimes there are issues with margins and other printing settings which vary from the results from a Windows machine. That’s when I really start hating printers.
In terms of “feel” I would say I’ve felt less frustrated with Brother than HP with linux, but as you can see the models are not equivalent, so I’m not confident in drawing broad conclusions from this.
I use HP only. The free availability of hplip and having it in the repo is great.
The one stickler that has to be accepted is that when you need to use the scanner on their MFP platforms (almost all now a days) is that you also have to install the HP proprietary plugin, which can be done from the hplip configuration panel during initial install or from the HP control panel if you have installed both hplip and hplip-gui. Without the plugin everything works but the scanner.
I recommend HP(multi functional printers too) under Linux, no issues for many years. HP is a very Linux supporting company. If you want easy printing under Linux buy HP.
+1 for Brother. Installation is not as easy as with HP, for DCP-7065DN I had to download some packages from Brother’s site and, to make network scanner work well, look through outdated instructions. On the other hand there are cheap, quality, compatible toner cartridges and drum units making initial effort worthwhile. 8 years later, it’s still working with just newer consumables. Once, after system upgrade, I had to troubleshoot network scanner, it turned out some package had to be installed (it was split out or something).
As a long-time (but now former) sysadmin, I hate printers almost as much as I hate DNS. But they’re a fact of life, still, somehow. A few years ago, I gave up on inkjets — ink was always drying out on me, needing re-calibration, etc. So I got a Brother printer based on what seemed like general sentiment about Linux friendliness. Ugh. Turned out to be a pain. Proprietary drivers, and unreliable connectivity — and then the thing broke a week after the warranty expired.
So, I went for the Canon Color imageCLASS MF743Cdw. It’s a little more expensive, but it has a three-year warranty. (I’d have really liked five, but three is at least something). And, here’s the key thing: it works with Fedora in driverless mode. Just connect it to the network and scan for printers, and there you go.
There is also a Linux driver provided (get it from Canon, if you like), but I’ve never actually needed it. It’s possibly you get more advanced functionality with this, but even without the basics of network printing with duplexing and so on work just fine.
Note: I’m posting this just as a user; this is not an official Fedora position or recommendation.
So would I be right if this is because the printer has either PostScript or PCL? My guess would be PS is the reason, seeing as that is (or was) the native unix / linux way of talking to printers.
It has been my experience that most printers will work (sometimes very basic) without installing the proprietary drivers. However if you want full functionality, and especially if you want scanning, you should install the proprietary drivers and make certain the printer is configured to use them.
I have stuck with HP because of hplip (included in my distro repository) and the small proprietary plugin needed for scanning.
Yeah, generally what I’ve done for scanning is used the printers’ own built-in features for scanning and saving to remote storage. But I don’t have very sophisticated needs. There is progress on “driverless scanning” (see this on the same site as linked above), but I still expect advanced features like dust removal to require proprietary drivers.
I don’t think I’ve ever manually installed proprietary printer drivers in linux. The “Add Printer” usually identifies the model or I might have to find it in a list it presents. I always found it way simpler than in Windows, at least for the driver installation.
Similarly, for scanning I use XSane. There’s also Simple Scan that comes pre-installed.
Yeah, but you failed to mention what particular brand/models of printers you use. Different manufacturers are different in the quality of built-in support.
Although the article is mostly focused on inkjet printers, the thought of buying things from companies engaging in such practices sure isn’t appetizing.
