zlacker

>>anothe+(OP)
My Brother printer is one of my better purchases to be honest. I sound like a complete shill, but it's connected to wifi (and it just happily connects even if it's been off for a month or two), and all devices can just connect to it and print. Never need to reconnect or do anything with it. It's a printer that prints. I love it.

>>ansc+T2
I have over time switched to Brother printers (lived through Epson and HP) because they are the least bad of the bunch. But Windows will still claim they are offline with no way to un-offline them, or print jobs will still get stuck from time to time - but this is probably just the Windows printer queue software staying exactly the same since two decades, with Microsoft giving zero fucks about it (or about anything requested by users, for that matter).

>>soco+L6
there is an LTT series where they try to daily drive Linux. They complain about a lot of stuff being half-broken, unfriendly or simply not missing. But they are amazed that printing just work out of the box without all the issues they have on Windows.

>>gpdere+vu
Because Linux uses CUPS, which is the same print server as macOS and made by Apple, Distros often ship generic CUPs drivers for printers, that work with most printers made in the last two decades.

Apple had no choice but to make CUPs support generic printing interfaces because printer companies at the time rarely made macOS drivers, and this has benefited Linux too.

>>PlutoI+wz
My memory may be failing me, but it feels like “rarely supported” is a bit of an exaggeration. It was mostly a handful of consumer printer companies that were hell-bent on supporting nothing but Windows… I think Lexmark might’ve been one of them?

Any of the printer companies that made high end professional printers used by print designers, photographers, etc usually had Mac drivers for their entire printer lineup because Macs had a huge presence in world of desktop publishing, graphics design, and photography from most of latter half of the 80s all the way up through the 2000s.