Looking for a new printer. My new HP Inkjet is a piece of fucking garbage and I’m going to smash it to pieces in my driveway.
Looking for something with good Linux support, and as little proprietary online HP-type bullshit as possible. Also, should I get a laser printer?
HP
You fucking what? 😂😂😂😂😂
Seriously, there might be a debate of what printer company is better, but there is no debate which one is worst. It’s HP. 😅 They are so bad that they have no competitors of the worst fucking printer company. xD
Myself I got Brother printer. Works like a charm, no bullshits. People on Reddit also highly recommend this brand too. Totally agree.
HP
Inkjet
Buy a laser printer. They’ve come down in price a ton and are so so so so so so so so so so much better than fucking ink jet printers. I’ll never go back, and regret the years of anger and stress they caused me.
Brother printers are the best as well.
I got a Brother HL-3140CW and couldn’t be happier. Also just works with Linux.
Brother is probably the best company regarding open source and support…
Also the refills are not overpriced…
I liked my Brother, but they have some tricks they pull. For one, when I got my Brother box duplex monochrome laser printer, it had just printed a fantastic looking page and then it stopped and declared it was out of toner. I turns out, there’s an option in the settings that is enabled by default to stop it from printing when it feels the toner is out. Anyway, I then ordered some aftermarket toner and the printer was fucked since. I’m not sure what happened, but the print quality went to crap. I’m guessing I’d need to buy a new drum kit or something, but for what I paid for it, I gave up on it and threw it out. I’ve not had a printer since. Occasionally, I wish I had a printer, but nowadays, you can get by without one fairly easily. I may purchase another Brother at some point, but it’s low on my list of things to get.
EDIT: I also forgot to mention that Brother label printers are annoying. I’m not sure if they own stock in battery companies, but if you let them sit with a battery in them, it will be fully depleted by the next time you’ll want to use it. I feel the engineers secretly offered a way to stop this without alerting upper management by leaving a void in the battery/media chamber with enough room to store a battery that you can pop out to disconnect the circuit and store the battery inside the unit. Also, they are overly generous with the margins for the labels by giving them like an inch on each side. Instead of a label printing out like [ TEST ], it prints out like [ TEST ]. Such horseshit!
Brother is my go to company for printers. Also definitely get laser, printer ink is like the most expensive substance on earth.
HL-L2320D brother laser printer, had it for years with no fuss. It doesn’t have wifi but who needs it when you can just plug it into a raspberry pi and share it on the network.
Brother laster printer. It’s the least evil I’ve found.
I got an Epson ecotank printer. It doesn’t work out of the box with Linux, but there are drivers and it does the job. Otherwise it’s been pretty dependable.
I agree with nearly everything I’m seeing. Maybe to summarize:
Laser of any kind is shelf stable. Liquid ink dries out and different printers compensate for this in different ways. Even dumb ink tank printers - where you add liquid and there’s no chip to be read anywhere - can have internal ink sponges that fill up and cause failures. Just a different kind of chipped consumable.
Color laser means four smaller cartridges and an extra wear part to replace after a few years: ITB or intermediate transfer belt. Instead of going from toner drum to paper, toner goes onto this belt first and then to the paper.
Different printer manufacturers have different behaviors to lock you into only buying their consumables. HP tends to be the worst offender, but it varies.
I got lucky, bought a used HP Color Laserjet Pro MFP M477fdw. Basically two generations old, and the top of their desktop / tabletop printer line without being tabloid / large-format or being a huge copy machine / document station.
Toner chip validation is an option you can turn off. For now. But individual components have firmware versions and can be incompatible with each other, so I’m fully confident I’m one part replacement away from needing to update firmware on everything else and losing this tolerant behavior. A full refill of all four cartridges (5000 pages) totals like $65 right now, so that will suck.
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Look at non-multi-function “Enterprise” laser printers. They are completely different than the consumer grade garbage.
I recommend an HP LaserJet Enterprise Mxxx printer, color or not, that is listed on the HPLIP All Supported Printer Models page.
You can find lightly used, older model ones on Ebay, sometimes even with a full toner cartridge(s), for much less than new price.
HP is still releasing firmware updates even for many older models, and the firmware is loaded with features (for example, if it is connected to your network, network printing works from Android and Apple phones without requiring any special apps). The firmware does not depend on any remote service.
If you even need them, the Linux drivers are free and open source and packaged in Debian main (for example); your don’t have to install some weird closed source garbage that won’t work in a few years.
People here are recommending Brother, but I don’t think they have free and open source drivers (think “nouveau vs. Nvidia”). Am I incorrect about that? In my experience, this can become a significant problem as software moves forward but the company does not continue to support their Linux binary driver.
I have found Canon has good support on Linux and the quality matches the price.
I bought a $80 refurbished HP laser printer m15w on eBay and I love it… prints fasts, toner lasts long and his cheap too… It has wireless but I plug it using USB to avoid having to install any HP software
Brother laser printers. Never buy a consumer inkjet. especially from HP.
+1 for Brother. Works great printing from Linux.
