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Comment by alpanka | Hacker News Reader

HP laserjets have pretty good Linux support, it's usually plugnplay on Ubuntu.

Confirmed, although it should be noted that some may require a blob ("Binary plugin") in order to print and/or scanning (mosts frequently scanning). See table here: https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing/bina....

  > Most Linux distributions include HPLIP with their software, but most do not include the plug-in

This is not exactly pleasing for open source enthusiasts (me included).

That proprietary plugin for scanning provides WSD and eSCL (AirScan) support. However, your distro might use recent enough sane and sane-airscan, that does support these protocols.

Due to recommendation here on HN, I've been checking Brother laser printers. They also require installing a proprietary package from the manufacturer, and a proprietary tool for the print queue setup.

I've tested two HP laser all-in-one models (MFP series), and the scanner did not work at all without the plugin. But I have no experience with other models.

HP Color LaserJet MFP M181fw here.

Year ago, the plugin was needed for the scanning. Today, it works out of the box with Fedora 33, no plugin (I'm using eSCL mode).

Fedora 33 ships with sane 1.0.31, sane-airscan 0.99.18 and hplip 3.20.9.

Is that a more recent thing for Brother? I have one (probably c5 years old) and although there are proprietary drivers if you want them, it will happily accept PCL or even PostScript (PostScript is slower though) over IPP and it has a basic interface on its http port (toner levels, page counts, etc).

It wasn't the lowest-end model but it wasn't super-expensive either. I think the next model down was the same but wouldn't take PostScript.

I was checking Brother MFC-L2712DW and found this: https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadlist.aspx?c=eu_ot&la...

Can anyone confirm, that this is not necessary and it works OOB with software shipped with distributions? (I need it to work with Ubuntu 20.04 and future LTS releases, preferably without anything that would bite me two years down the line).

I don't have this model but it's likely to work fine for printing - the specs say it accepts PCL and there are decent profiles shipped now with the normal Linux distros for Brother printers. You might need to select a different model which is "close" to get optimal output and/or experiment a bit.

Scanning is more difficult to tell but it may well work using SANE's AirScan driver, called eSCL as it looks like this model supports AirScan/AirPrint scanning. This shouldn't need the proprietary drivers as I understand it. The next models up (MFC-273x and higher) look like they support scanning and saving directly to an FTP server or CIFS/SMB share on your network which wouldn't need a driver so that might be a more surefire option.

Thanks.

I prefer the list at https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing/supp... which shows which models do not need the blob.

I have had nothing but problems with HP LaserJet CP1025nw color on Ubuntu in the last five years or so (and on Arch I could not make it print anything). Bought it based on similar comments, so buyer beware.

The only thing that has worked (at all) has been the instructions and software from http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/, even if the site looks way too sketchy to my liking. Recently, though, even those drivers have started misbehaving and do not print the last centimeter or two on the page---the solution is to select upside down printing in the print settings.

The zjs printers on Linux are a PITA. I have a LaserJet 1020. And I have had times where it worked flawlessly, then a change in a kernel module or anything else and stoped working but not always only sometimes, sometimes the distribution drivers worked, others only the ones in the ffo2zjs page ones, so I had to change from one to the other . Now it looks like they are more stable and only had problems once when someone made a mistake in an update of the driver it was solved in less than a week once located.

Unless it is a printer+scanner combo, which requires some proprietary part that is downloaded by hplip package from HP web, and causes random breakage during upgrades.

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