this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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My partner and I are thinking about getting a Brother laser printer for home use in the near future. How difficult is it to get a newer model working in a Linux ecosystem? Are there any specific drivers we should look into installing, if a specific driver isn't available for the model we end up getting? Any advice for connecting it to our network?

EDIT: Thank you all for the feedback! It seems that generally you all have had decent experiences with Brother on Linux, depending on the distro, and that there are resources out there to help with any issues that might come up.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

As an outlier in skimming the other comments. Mine wasn't great.

I replaced it a few years ago, so I'm working from incomplete memory here, but here's what I recall. I had a Brother laser printer. I don't recall the model. The drivers were binary, only available for x86/x86_64, and only packaged in deb and rpm. Which certainly covers most cases, but it's still limiting.

I saw in another comment some only support GDI. I bet that was the case for me.

I think a good takeaway from this isn't to not buy Brother, but to check support for the model you're looking at beforehand.