BTW, I’ve had my Brother laser MFP for 11 years and still on the original toner.

  • LordCrom@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    36
    ·
    7 months ago

    I would take any laser printer with a scanner/copier that doesn’t have a subscription model that has Linux drivers for all features .

    Brother is the only one I’ve found to check all the boxes

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      7 months ago

      My only gripe with it was the scan drivers were not easy to configure to enable network scanning.

      Once I figured that out, I made a SANE scan server that has the drivers, and I just point all my devices to that (SANE to SANE) and don’t even need to install the actual scanner drivers. It’s damn amazing.

      • droans@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        7 months ago

        Oh, the software is actually called SANE. I thought you were just making clear how bad Brother’s drivers were.

        • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          edit-2
          7 months ago

          Oh, yeah. lol. It’s the Linux scanner framework. It has a network protocol that will talk to other SANE services and allow scanners to be shared.

          My scan programs all go through SANE, so you don’t need the Brother drivers on each PC you want to scan from (just the machine that is interfacing with the scanner; in my case, it’s a Docker container on my server).

          Learning I could do that was pretty life changing. lol

      • Dultas@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        7 months ago

        Maybe it depends on the model? I just set it up on one a laptop a couple weeks ago and it only took like 10 minutes.

      • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        7 months ago

        Once I figured that out, I made a SANE scan server that has the drivers, and I just point all my devices to that (SANE to SANE) and don’t even need to install the actual scanner drivers. It’s damn amazing.

        Could you point me towards instructions on how to do that?

      • Opisek@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        7 months ago

        Did the same thing for mine. I’ve got one with ADF scanning, but it’s only one-sided. So I simply wrote some script on my scan server that merges the current scan with the last scan if they have the same amount of pages and now I can easily scan stacks of paper with both sides. After that it goes through some compression and off to my NAS. Ah, love my pipeline, so glad how simple the printer’s Linux drivers made it.

        • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          7 months ago

          That’s awesome! I’d love to expand mine to do more like that, but the model I have doesn’t have the ADF so it’s kind of pointless.