EDIT: I purchased the Brother L2690DW on a Clearance deal from Walmart and so far it has been a breeze using it between my Linux desktop and laptop.
My faithful Brother laser printer just poo’d itself. And since I’ve not purchased a new printer with additional features since I switched to full-time Linux, I thought I’d better ask around to make sure the document scanning, copy, fax (maybe once a year if that), and other features will work correctly.
The printer I have no worked without issue with Pop!_OS. Very straight forward plug in play other than a weird quirk with scaling when printing from Firefox built-in PDF handler vs the Document Viewer that ships with Pop.
Does anyone have any advice on potential pitfalls to avoid? I’d like to stick with brother because they seem to be the least evil of the printer corps, but I’m open to other suggestions.
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I am not a big fan of this, because you then rely on the scanner manufacturer to produce good quality results.
I scan everything using VueScan and that has a special mode for text documents. A single page with OCR ends up being about 25kb as PDF. It removes folding edges, sharpens the letters, etc.
If that software gets new features, my scanning experience improves automatically, even though I still use the same scanner for 10 years now.
With relying on the firmware, I would have long ago stopped getting updates and I either was ok with the results or I could throw away the whole device.
Just as people here recomment to separate printing from scanning, I recomment to separate the hardware and software.
I’ve felt more comfortable with single function devices since there are fewer ways to go wrong.
I would normally agree but then I saw how cool Paperless-NGX is and had a mighty need to self host and get organized. Or at least that’s how I’m justifying it to myself…
No idea about paperless ngx but printer mfgrs generally don’t think about Linux. Instead Linux users buy some specific printers and after years of effort manage to get them working mostly usably. With a multifunction device you want the software to implement 3x the functions at the same time, which sort of cubes the difficulty. It may be even worse since the MFC is an economy product with more flakiness swept under its windows software.
I guess try web searches about the machine you are considering, but I’d be pessimistic. Consider a separate printer and scanner. Those do work if you choose good models. Basically you want commercial and industrial gear, not home office stuff.
I also think document imaging software is good enough now that for light duty use, you can get away with phone camera snaps instead of using a scanner.
I would look for a printer that supports Web Services for Devices (WSD) or Airscan (eSCL). These protocol allows you setup a scanner without installing a driver.
Here are a couple of starting points for sane-airscan. I discovered it long after I had installed the drivers for my all-in-one.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SANE#Sharing_your_scanner_over_a_network
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jammy/man5/sane-airscan.5.html
Brother has good support for Linux, but scanning over the network still requires a closed source driver. No driver is needed for printing on most of the recent Brother printers.
