On 12/8/24 03:54, Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote:

If you are able, please recommend a black-and-white Postscript laser printer that will work well with Debian (Bookworm). After 29 years, I'm finally, and sadly, giving up on my HP LaserJet 5MP. At work I had problems with Linux drivers for a Xerox

laser, and I'm trying to avoid that. Some Reddit posts favor Brother.

Thanks.
.

And I 2nd Brother. I have 2, one is the starter priced B&W, and one the
deluxx inkjet with two paper trays, does B&W AND fantastic Color on good
glossy paper. Brother drivers are available for linux om the brother
america site. You may have to remove cups-browsed as it grabs the
printers for the vastly inferior cups drivers. Brother drivers work for
every feature on the printers box.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis

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On 07/12/2024 18:21, Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote:

If you are able, please recommend a black-and-white Postscript laser printer that will work well with Debian (Bookworm). After 29 years, I'm finally, and sadly, giving up on my HP LaserJet 5MP. At work I had problems with Linux drivers for a Xerox

laser, and I'm trying to avoid that. Some Reddit posts favor Brother.

Get one from this list
https://openprinting.github.io/printers/
so that you do not have to worry about needing specific drivers.

See this page for some introductory concepts: https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSDriverlessPrinting


--
When you are in it up to your ears, keep your mouth shut.

Eduardo M KALINOWSKI
eduardo@kalinowski.com.br

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Timothy M Butterworth composed on 2024-12-08 08:13 (UTC-0500):

Steven (kleenesj) wrote:

If you are able, please recommend a black-and-white Postscript laser
printer that will work well with Debian (Bookworm). After 29 years, I'm
finally, and sadly, giving up on my HP LaserJet 5MP. At work I had
problems with Linux drivers for a Xerox laser, and I'm trying to avoid
that. Some Reddit posts favor Brother.

I recommend Canon. I have a Canon TR4722 Pixma ink jet all-in-one printer. Canon has drivers and a configuration script on their website. Setup and configuration was very easy.

I'll never buy any Canon product again. It took me 6 months to find the driver my
MF laser needed, eventually in Europe, after buying it at an Office Depot store in
USA. Canon's official position at the time was something like the product was not
supported in the USA on Linux, even though its retail box clearly stated Linux was
supported. It worked OK with correct drivers, but only for 5 years of very minimal
usage. The reduced capacity OEM cartridge was still working when the printer quit.
I now have only Brothers: one laser purchased new, one MF laser purchased used, and a color inkjet gifted that I have yet to try.
--
Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion,
based on faith, not based on science.

Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata

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On 12/7/24 16:21, Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote:

If you are able, please recommend a black-and-white Postscript laser
printer that will work well with Debian (Bookworm). After 29 years, I'm finally, and sadly, giving up on my HP LaserJet 5MP. At work I had
problems with Linux drivers for a Xerox laser, and I'm trying to avoid
that. Some Reddit posts favor Brother.

I have had two HPs -- 4100N and 4200. The former is the backup printer, and while I have not used it with Debian, I used it with Ubuntu for years. I
have not had any problems with the 4200 that weren't directly caused by the cat. I expect the feed rollers to get hard and slick but it hasn't happened yet. It works fine with Debian, Windows, and I think MacOS. It works OK
(most of the time) with Android.

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On 8/12/24 05:21, Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote:

If you are able, please recommend a black-and-white Postscript laser printer that will work well with Debian (Bookworm). After 29 years, I'm finally, and sadly, giving up on my HP LaserJet 5MP. At work I had problems with Linux drivers for a Xerox

laser, and I'm trying to avoid that. Some Reddit posts favor Brother.

Thanks.

What country?

..
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
(UTC+0800)
..............

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On Saturday 07 December 2024 04:21:40 pm Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote:

If you are able, please recommend a black-and-white Postscript laser printer that will work well with Debian (Bookworm). After 29 years, I'm finally, and sadly, giving up on my HP LaserJet 5MP. At work I had problems with Linux drivers for a Xerox

laser, and I'm trying to avoid that. Some Reddit posts favor Brother.

I too have a 5MP, whiich eventually gave me some trouble. It was also very slow, slower for pages having more complex graphics. These days I'm using an HP 1320. Love that duplexer!

--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space,  a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed.  --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

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On 2024-12-08 10:21, Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote:

If you are able, please recommend a black-and-white Postscript laser printer that will work well with Debian (Bookworm). After 29 years, I'm finally, and sadly, giving up on my HP LaserJet 5MP. At work I had problems with Linux drivers for a Xerox

laser, and I'm trying to avoid that. Some Reddit posts favor Brother.

Some debian-user posts favour Brother, such as mine from September,
copied below. 😆


Every time this question comes up at work, the response is always the
same: to send the latest version of this article:
"After a full year of not thinking about printers, the best printer is
still whatever random Brother laser printer that’s on sale." https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework
My Brother MFC-L2740DW All-In-One Mono Laser (discontinued) is almost
ten years old and continues to serve me well. I am sure they have newer
models that are similar. It is on my WiFi network (as 192.168.0.42) and
also serves a Mac and a Windows PC.

- Open source CUPS drivers work (foomatic-db-compressed-ppds
20230202-1), though the Gnome print dialog seems to required for high
quality printing

- Closed source (?) scanner drivers work (brscan4 0.4.11-10)

I am on sid amd64. My setup notes:


CUPS config:

Use ipp connection and select Brother / IPP Everywhere driver

Description: Brother MFC-L2740DW
Driver: MFC-L2740DW series - IPP Everywhere (grayscale, 2-sided printing)
Connection: ipp://192.168.0.42/ipp
Defaults: job-sheets=none, none media=iso_a4_210x297mm sides=two-sided-long-edge

Options: quality normal, two-sided long edge


Sane config (run as root):

brsaneconfig4 -a name=Brother_MFC-L2740DW model=MFC-L2740DW ip=192.168.0.42

Check config:

$ cat /etc/opt/brother/scanner/brscan4/brsanenetdevice4.cfg DEVICE=Brother_MFC-L2740DW , "MFC-L2740DW" , 0x4f9:0x320 , IP-ADDRESS=192.168.0.42


Cheers,

--
Ash Joubert (they/them) <ash@transient.nz>
Director / Game Developer
Transient Software Limited <https://transient.nz/>
New Zealand

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Kleene, Steven (kleenesj) wrote:

If you are able, please recommend a black-and-white Postscript
laser printer that will work well with Debian (Bookworm). After
29 years, I'm finally, and sadly, giving up on my HP LaserJet
5MP. At work I had problems with Linux drivers for a Xerox
laser, and I'm trying to avoid that. Some Reddit posts favor
Brother.

Decades ago, before desktop laser printers were even a thing, my
typewriter dealer regarded Brother as not terribly reliable or easy to
service. But of course, that was typewriters; daisywheel typewriters,
but still typewriters (I still have the Silver-Reed Penman he sold me;
it was in good working order the last time it was turned on).

My own laser printers have all been HPs (B&W, but nothing newer than a 2100-series) and Samsungs (color), but I think we did have a small
Brother laser printer around the office at one point, that worked
reasonably well.

The one time I bought a Xerox laser printer (color), it went right back
to Staples within 24 hours of arrival: it claimed to be a PostScript
machine, but was incapable of actually parsing a PS data stream (it
expected the host computer to do the RIPping for it), and in real life,
it was far bulkier, heavier, and noisier than it had looked "on paper."

Quite frankly, I'd rather keep my HP 2100M and my Samsung 415 than
anything currently in production, and I recently had the 415 overhauled,
at more than the cost of replacing it with a more recent model.

--
JHHL

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On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 04:17:26PM -0000, Greg wrote:

I have a Brother HL-2350DW and it just worked without further ado.

Pretty much any modern networked single-function printer will just work.
I've used canon and lexmark fairly recently, but no drivers are required
for any brand's printer that supports driverless IPP. (And any vendor
drivers are more likely to screw things up than help at this point.)

Multifunction printers are a whole different story, but I've always
preferred a printer to print and a scanner to scan.

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On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 12:41:34PM -0000, Greg wrote:

Way back when I was still in high school, I had a Corona electric
typewriter (it had ink cartridges you'd slip in). If you made a typo,
you'd insert the correction cartridge and type over it.

Quite the advancement over white-out, or that horrible erasible paper.

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On 6/12/25 08:32, Greg wrote:

On 2025-06-12, Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 04:17:26PM -0000, Greg wrote:

I have a Brother HL-2350DW and it just worked without further ado.

Pretty much any modern networked single-function printer will just work.
I've used canon and lexmark fairly recently, but no drivers are required
for any brand's printer that supports driverless IPP. (And any vendor
drivers are more likely to screw things up than help at this point.)

I'll argue with this statement Greg. I have 2 brother printers. An
economy laser and an elderly ink squirt-er. Both run best with the
factory Linux drivers but to do that, cups-browsed must be removed. The
brother drivers, particularly for the MFC-J6920DW make the printer do everything advertised on the box, including stunningly great color from
photo paper in the top tray, but the cups drivers have yet to recognize
the fact the printer has two trays, instead using the 50 cents a sheet
photo paper in the top tray for everything. The cost of that is why I'm
adamant about this. Brother actively supports its printers with linux
drivers.

Multifunction printers are a whole different story, but I've always
preferred a printer to print and a scanner to scan.

For the odd document I need to "scan," I use my smartphone these days.

.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis

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I think the original poster specifically wanted a laser printer (I'm
with him on that, and with Greg: inkjets are the perfect
"razor-and-blades model" device, with a rock-bottom initial cost and
expensive consumables, and the printed documents are very
water-sensitive), and specifically a PostScript printer (which I
narrowly define as one that will RIP a PostScript data stream
internally, rather than expecting the host to RIP it in the driver,
which is a non-negotiable requirement for my B&W machine).

Personally, I would not accept an inkjet as a gift. As far as I'm
concerned, the only thing an inkjet does well is edible printing, and
for that, you need to dedicate an inkjet for the purpose, and never run anything but edible ink in it. Which is why I farm my edible printing
out to the local cake supply shop.

--
JHHL

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Am 12.06.2025 um 14:16 schrieb Michael Stone:

On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 04:17:26PM -0000, Greg wrote:

I have a Brother HL-2350DW and it just worked without further ado.

Pretty much any modern networked single-function printer will just work.
I've used canon and lexmark fairly recently, but no drivers are required
for any brand's printer that supports driverless IPP. (And any vendor
drivers are more likely to screw things up than help at this point.)

I have made good experiences with buying refurbished B2B printers,
specifically ones that are designed for leasing business. They tend to
be designed to last long and to be repairable. Refills (be it ink or
powder or whatever) are usually on the cheaper side, especially if you
use good quality alternative providers. Right now, I am using a Konica
Minolta multifunction device (connected to a Samba/CUPS server). But
Kyocera Mita was also good, and they are known for providing spare parts
to end customers for quite some time.

Multifunction printers are a whole different story, but I've always
preferred a printer to print and a scanner to scan.

I see your point. But you likely need more space for two devices. And
making simple copies is probably more complicated. But "jedem Tierchen
sein Pläsierchen" (each to his/her own), as my late grandmother used to
say...

Paul

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