is the Printer Driver obsolete (it should be)

business_kid · 06-07-2019, 04:40 AM

Back in the day I used to print with a Canon Bubblejet using just gs, no cups at all! That canon had it's own language, but gs had it. One driver did every canon printer.

rnturn · 06-11-2019, 11:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dugan

My Brother DCP-7060D has great Linux support. The manufacturer provides Linux drivers. They work.

They never used to. Provide Linux drivers, that is. I immediately returned a nice little Brother printer many years ago that advertised PostScript support but, as soon as I opened the box, I found that that support only came through a Windows-only driver on the enclosed CD.

HP's B/W laser printers have been a mainstay because of their PS support. I upgraded to an M402dn because of the still available PS support. And I love now having the duplexing feature that I use by default but can disable as needed via the driver. (Shees! Have you priced printer paper lately? :^/ )

Cheers...

business_kid · 06-12-2019, 04:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rnturn

HP's B/W laser printers have been a mainstay because of their PS support. I upgraded to an M402dn because of the still available PS support. And I love now having the duplexing feature that I use by default but can disable as needed via the driver. (Shees! Have you priced printer paper lately? :^/ )

Amen to that.

I'll add one caveat: Avoid the cheapo ones if you're on wifi. I had to set my HP Laserjet Professional P1102W wifi address under (spit!) Windows, because HPlip is congenitally incapable. Now I don't have windows anymore, except in a VM, so the next time it goes it may be an interesting experience.

Shadow_7 · 06-13-2019, 09:01 AM

My HP 722c is ancient, but still works. But HP doesn't make ink for it anymore. I got a samsung laser printer on craigslist for $65. But the toner is too low to use it, and the replacement toner is $90-ish on amazon. I really like the driver for the samsung (splix) though. So many options. I had another hp long ago when hplip was still an inkjet and office jet split driver (hpoj / hpinkjet?). And it was a real B to get going. After a lot of effort, to include installing gentoo over dialup (actually worked / for one sheet). It turned out that the ink was too low / empty, which the driver DIDN'T report. But otherwise pretended to work without actually printing anything. It also needed the pnm2ppa driver, NOT included as a dependency of hplip.

sevendogsbsd · 06-13-2019, 09:08 AM

I settled on a Xerox Phaser 3260: got it for about $80 on Amazon. Cartridges are maybe $40? It can do postscript and PCL although I use cups because it's so easy. I actually have it hooked to my NAS so I can print from any device on my network that has drivers.

It's crazy to me that typically printer replacement cartridges (laser) can cost more than the whole printer.