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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

It absolutely enrages me that in 2021 printers are still the absolute horror show that they are. Things were better in 1999.

The article covers the driver story so I won't go into that, but in addition to the horrible Linux support it amazes me that a cheap affordable printer and ink is still not available. Ink is now not only outrageously priced but commonly has DRM in it.

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I've never actually had a problem printing in Linux. It had always been plug and play for me. My trick is to make sure the printer actually can be plugged in (USB or Ethernet) and that it isn't the most recent model.

Also, get a laserprinter. Inkjets are going to be a problem regardless of drivers.

Do you print photos? My wife loves to print photos and has been told by friends that a laser printer won't do photos.

Color laser printers are IMO even better at photos than inkjet, but many are black and white.

I would never recommend anyone buy an inkjet printer, but with special paper they do seem to produce much better output than any colour laser I’ve seen (though usually not up to the standards of photo printing robots at drug stores.)

For that use case I'd actually recommend Walmart's photo printing service, either in-store or on-line. Outsourcing makes sense in this case - the alternative would be a 7-colour inkjet printer, and the really pricey thing is replacement of the printhead when it invariably gets clogged up.

No. For photos I use a service, like a sibling suggests. Sorting out the right paper and printer is not worth it for the number of photos I wish to print, which ranges in the single digits per year. I like to get larger prints as well, which means printers would be getting quite expensive.

They don't print photos well. Unless by "loves to print photos" you mean that she wants to have complete control of the workflow from her calibrated monitor to profiled specialty papers, she's better off using a good printing service (I suggest c-prints made on photosensitive paper with Lightjet or Durst Lambda machines to most people) rather than exploring the expensive and time consuming rabbit hole of serious home printing.

> My trick is to make sure the printer actually can be plugged in (USB or Ethernet)

This article is specifically about dropping support for USB printers. Which is bananas.

I've never had any trouble with my USB-only Brother printer in linux since I bought it like a decade ago.

CUPS will need to be forked, unfortunately.

Get a laser printer. They're much more reasonable for home use than they were in 1999.

I bought a Brother HL-L2370DW (there's a bunch in the HL-L23xx series, varying slightly in speed and price and availability) about two years ago for I think around $120, which is cheaper than the inkjet my family had in 1999 (not even accounting for inflation). It's about as tall as my hand and it fits nicely on an Expedit. I print about two pages every two months. Since it's a laser, the ink doesn't dry up. It also sits on the wifi and works out of the box with my (non-Linux) devices without any driver setup, so I imagine it will work great with CUPS driverless printing on Linux. The amortized cost of printing (drum/toner) is about 4 cents a page.

I think there's a bunch of other options in the space of ~$100 small laser printers, and I think there are reasonable color lasers in the ~$300 range (but I've found I need color printing once every few years, and it's cheaper to go to the local FedEx or something than either pay for a color laser or deal with an inkjet and its drying ink).

EDIT: I see a bunch of other comments are recommending Brother specifically! I picked them based on an old Wirecutter review (now at https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-home-printer... I think) because they specifically mentioned reliability for low usage, and I can attest it's been great at that.

I have one of these as well. It works perfectly with AirPrint. I can print documents easily from my iPhone via wifi and have never installed a driver.

Same, and Brother has an Android app that works great for printing and scanning from Android phones. I never connect my printer to a computer anymore.

The only thing I don't like about my Brother HL2170W is that it doesn't have duplex (and that's because I didn't think about it when I bought it).

I put a piece of tape over the window on the toner cartridge like 5 years ago, it's still printing with nice quality.

I do not think it's that bad now.

A few days ago I have bought a new non original toner cartridge for my HP printer for about $7. Is it expensive tho? I expect it to print at least 2000 pages, so $0.0035 per page.

For ink jet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_ink_system

> and ink is still not available. Ink is now not only outrageously priced but commonly has DRM in it.

Nowadays, printers with refillable tanks instead of cartridges are quite widely available.

I’ve only had good experiences with printing on Linux, but admittedly my sample size is one. I have an ancient printer. Windows drivers were nearly impossible to find, and when I did find them they cause windows 10 to blue screen.

In Linux, I plug it in and click print. Scanning works too. Click scan get a picture/pdf.

I’ve had 3 Brother printers on Linux with zero issues. They work immediately with the standard Fedora printer setup.

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