Dear community. I’d love to switch from Fedora Workstation to Fedora Silverblue. One of my requirements is to use a multifunctional color laser printer (print/scan) via network. I need to buy a new printer anyway, so I thought I’d give it a try to see if anyone has a recommendation for a color laser MFP which can be fully used under Fedora Silverblue. I read that there are numerous issued with HP printers under Silverblue, but how about Brother offering RPM packaged drivers? Any recommendation for a printer (ideally available in Germany) that can be used to the full extend via network is appreciated.
Thank you very much for your help.
Best regards
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I have an Ethernet-connected Brother inkjet (MFC-J4540DW) which works great driverlessly on Fedora KDE, both for printing and scanning.
I think there are Brother RPM drivers, but I haven’t bothered installing them because I have everything I want in driverless mode. So I assume it would work the same if I switched to Fedora Kinoite from the non-atomic Fedora KDE.
I know you’re asking about lasers though, so I don’t know if it’s 100% the same for Brother lasers.
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Thanks for your reply. If you say printing and scanning works driverlessly, that applies to printing AND scanning via network, correct? Does that work via IPP? Would you know if I could expect HP MFPs to work the same way if they are IPP compatible?
Correct.
Yes it does.
I should also say I use the printer’s admin web interface to do some tasks (e.g. kicking off a print head clean). Again, no driver needed, it just works in a browser.
I don’t know for sure. I expect you’d get basic functionality but it’s possible more advanced stuff might only be available through the driver. That’s pure speculation though, I haven’t used HP on Linux.
Great, thank you very much for your help. Really appreciate it. Let’s see if there’s anyone else with experiences.
AFAIK most HP MFPs work with IPP or net for printing. However, I believe that with HP retaining the scan function to require a proprietary plugin for scanning when using their printers that use the hplip app it may become an issue where scanning is blocked. I have not seen any instances where it was reported that scanning worked without using hplip and installing the plugin.
I do not know where the plugin is stored on the system so cannot be sure it would work on silverblue.
What to look for is Mopria and/or AirPrint certified printers, which would work out of the box.
To spam my own stuff, I have a page on printing over a network about scanning and printing from CLI. I use a Brother MFC-L3780CDW. I didn’t need the drivers from Brother, I was able to use airscan and the everywhere driver for printing. I didn’t use silverblue but I imagine it would work on any version of Fedora.
I have an HP laser printer and fear that they will firmware update it into not working for me. HP has a track records of customer hostile upgrades.
When I need to replace my HP laser it will be with a Brother as Brother have not been customer hostile with there firmware updates.