[Linux] Printer manufacturer for small office

Hi,

We have several small offices and part of my job is keep gears running. Printing is huge pain in the ass for time to time and I am trying to find final solution to user printing experience.

Now we have Brother compo devices for printing and scanning. I have some experience from HP devices too. Biggest problems with Brother is workstation cannot wake up a network printer from sleep. Older workstations with usb connection cannot recognise printer if is powered off during the boot.

Brother installation is covered with bash script installation and all current models is supported for my understood.
HP has some open source software ( distro repo package ) to setup printer, all consumer printers is not supported?

So what is most linux friendly printer manufacturer? I can tell a have something else to do that being a printer helpdesk.

These days, get a network printer, and put it on the same subnet as the systems that print. A lot of distros, *buntus at least, will see it and configure it automatically.

Boring story :wink:
I have a Brother printer and when I got it in 2017-ish I went through the whole installation script thing, which was a hassle to find (I found it on their Singapore site.) Worked greati (waking from sleep not a problem). Then, early 2020, a flaky motherboard caused lots of hangs, and eventually the filesystem got corrupted and I elected to wipe and reinstall Kubuntu. In the drama about resurrecting the system, restoring data, and getting everything reinstalled I clean forgot about the printer. A couple of months later I realized I’d been printing merrily, without configuring anything. It literally just worked.

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Is connecting the Brother printer directly to the network an option? I used to have mine connected directly via LAN cable and it wakes and sleeps no problem. No need to mess with printer drivers.

Can confirm Ubuntu ease of use for Brother and HP

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When people say “office printer” most folks picture something like:

Which basically doesn’t care about other device OS, but you may need to carefully firewall off and carefully configure email / directory access for it for people to email PDFs to themselves… and make sure you take out the HDDs or SSDs before sending them for service.


I sense you have a smaller use case in mind.

How many pages per month?
How long are you willing to wait for e.g. 50 pages worth of printout?

e.g. Epson has some small “ecotank” models that are cheaper than average laser printers per page, but slower… but have ethernet and speak PostScript as one would expect from a decent office printer.

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there is a black and white only version also. these things are a great work group networked printer for a small to medium office. CUPS drivers are available.

these range from 300$ to 600$ depending on features included.

As already mentioned, most printers will auto-configure in Linux when networked on the same subnet as the machine that’s printing, and need no add’l configuration.

I have a Brother MFC-L5850DW that I’ve been using for a few years now and it’s never needed any troubleshooting other than the drum+fuser being cleaned occasionally.

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I have a Brother MFC L3770CDW and its great. I have 0 issues with it in linux, and as expected its better than the windows and mac experience (because windows just sucks at printers, apple is fine with airprint)

I traded up to this one from a previous generation MCF L2750DW https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/919736/Brother-MFC-L2750DW-Wireless-Monochrome-Black/ which also was flawless in linux.

I strongly recommend either and Brother overall as a brand since they have wide support, you can get clone/refilled toner, and laser just works better than inkjet in all but photo printing situations. If I need to print photos, I just send them to Walgreens to print, it overall costs me less than trying to maintain a inkjet printer.

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This is generally true, but it’s still worth checking beforehand. My own Epson network printer just appeared in my Printers section without any input from me. My dad wasn’t so lucky. It’s not even like you can say “this brand has good support, this brand doesn’t,” you need to look at the specific model. I wasn’t really expecting for Epson to support my scanner (across a wide range of distros, even), but they do, but not his model of printer in particular.

On the whole Linux support of Printers is pretty good, you just get unlucky sometimes.

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