i need some help buying a monochrome laser printer with scanning that supports linux, plug and play is a nice thing to have.

🖨️ my available brands are : Epson, cannon and brother

❌ no need for WiFi, fax ,ect

  • 20gramsWrench@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    I think hp and windows rotted the way you view drivers, what I call drivers are just what your computer use to communicate with devices, they aren’t software suite that updates and ask for your account, drivers are like 2kb text files with a index of available function and what signal to sent to the printer for it to print, what you see as drivers is the heavy and predatory spyware they ship with printer to steal your data and make you spend more miney, when you install a printer on linux (especially brother) you are just getting the little file with the printer’s language, depending on your distro, it will give you a big ass list of available drivers to use with the printer you just connected, it won’t ever ask you to update or even try to communicate with the internet, since it’s a passive file that your computer use and not a program that is launched

    • Reihar@beehaw.orgBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Also, to be fair, HP has download link to windows drivers only but they heavily push the windows crapware suite download links on their site.

      • 20gramsWrench@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        They probably do but I have a vague work memory of a model of personal printer that forced me to go look through the driverstore folder of another computer with the spyware installed because they didn’t offer anything else but their program which couldn’t be launched in the env I had to do it in