Avoid HP at all cost and stick to Brother, Cannon and Epson. HP is a company that had the privilege of having their logo on a iPod but is a complete turd at the end of the day.
How finicky? If it doesn't like the version of something it forks itself until it borks your computer.
Used HP, Lexmark, Xerox, Samsung & Kyocera. All worked with Linux. Also, none of the HP printers I used created any problems during their lifetimes with me. One of them was very light duty, and I worn it down in 7-8 years, that's all.
Most Canons also understand PCL6 too. I guess you've checked your own machine though.
This was a work endeavor, so I don't have the machine handy, so I can't provide you a model number.
[1] https://www.canon-europe.com/support/consumer_products/produ...
Especially for a bog-standard black-and-white laser, there's nothing that needs to be done now that couldn't be done with PostScript or PCL circa 1995. (Yeah, there's a bazillion stupid ideas for mobile-device connectivity and wireless setup, but those are tangential to "here is an IP address and port, feed it PostScript and pages come out") I could see a case for a minor "reverse channel" extension to allow for feature detection and probing consumable supplies, but that's something that should have been a documented, industry-standard API, and could be optional.
I assume it represents two factors:
1. They believe there's enough "value add" in the software (enforcing accounts or consumable purchases) to carry its weight on the books. 2. The hardware is so phenomenally bad that they're relying on mountains of model-specific firmware and driver glue to make it even remotely resemble a functional printer.
I suppose we missed our chance at the USB cutover-- we seemed to get a unified standard for HID and mass storage, but nobody wrangled the printer and scanner people.