Evening fellow EOSers,
looking for advise on a new wireless inkjet all in one printer. My current HP is starting to fail, and frankly the cost of ink it getting out of hand, and HP really isn’t all the friendly anymore.
I’ve been looking at both the brother printers, which usually have good linux support, and an epson echotank, but I don’t know how well it will work on linux.
Any suggestions?
I purchased a Brother multi-function some years back, because the general advice was they had good Linux support. And indeed, official RedHat and Debian drivers were provided on the website. However, for quite a while, I struggled to get this working under Arch/EndeavourOS, while it worked quite well from Kubuntu.
Ultimately, I never really got those drivers working well under Arch. Printing was always mostly busted, printing test pages, but failing at most other things.
In the end, the game-changer was not trying to get drivers working, but instead using driverless printing (AirPrint / IPP Everywhere), and ensuring the mdns service is unblocked on my machine to enable printer discovery.
So long as the printer supports AirPrint and/or IPP Everywhere, and you unblock the mdns service on your Linux systems, I suspect things will work fine for you.
Scanning is a bit different. Were you looking to get a multifunction?
yes I was looking for multifunction, I do seem to have to scan the odd document pretty often
I’m able to scan from my Brother, but drivers are needed for that. For example, brscan5 is available in the AUR and these work for me. It needs a bit of manual setup after install, a few commands to configure things. I can’t speak to other brands.
I also use xsane to do my scanning. It’s about the ugliest application on my system, looking more like Gimp did 20 years ago, but it’s the most featured scanning application I’m aware of. For simpler scanning, simple-scan (aka Document Scanner) is pretty good too.
HP used to be very Linux friendly, but their shenanigans have put me off. So when my parents needed a new printer, I went with Brother all in one MFC-J4335DW. I helped them setup remotely on their Debian desktop and laptop. Fwiw, I would get this for myself for my next printer.
I think that’s the printer I got for my mother, which works pretty well.I am considering getting an Epson echotank, just like the idea of how the ink refill works. Either way it’s going to either be an epson or brother.
Wanted to update you all on what printer I ended up getting. As I said it was between a Brother printer, which I knew, and everyone confirmed, has good Linux support and an Epson Echotank. In the end I got an Epson Echotank 4850, which does everything driverless. As @Bink said the key was to make sure avahi was working properly (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Avahi#Hostname_resolution) and then select the driverless printer. Everything just works including dirverless scanning !