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.

  • dan@upvote.au
    0·
    7 months ago

    I’d recommend two devices that do one thing well (separate printer and scanner) compared to one device that does both things kinda okay. It also means you can upgrade just one of them instead of having to replace both.

    • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 months ago

      A standalone scanner only really makes sense if you scan a lot of documents. Otherwise an all in one will so just fine.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        If you don’t scan a lot of documents you can also take pics with your phone and run them through a cleanup & straighten app (aka “scanner” apps).

    • aksdb@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 months ago

      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.