Linux

Brother printers are plug and play for me.

Long story short: if your printer supports IPP Everywhere (it probably does) you don't need drivers or any sort of software other than CUPS.

If it's a network printer and it lists Postscript and/or PCL6 support on its specs it should be good for at least basic printing. I still use my Brother laser though, haven't needed to replace it yet.

I have to regularly use HP, Brother, and Epson wireless printers with my laptop, and they've all worked via CUPS with no tinkering that I can recall. In one of the cases (the Epson WF-3720) the available settings and indicators were very limited, but beyond that no issues.

All inkjet printers are an ink scam. If you don't need color, or need it infrequently, get a b/w laser printer and be done with it. I bought a used HP Laserjet 2430 back with Ubuntu 18 and never looked back. I print a lot, and just a month ago broke into a toner cartridge I bought five years ago.

I have two Brother printers at home that worked perfectly, out of the box. All I had to do was install and enable CUPS, which AFAIK should be done on a number of mainstream distros already. You really can't go wrong with Brother on Linux.

Afaik, most of them are supported. Haven't had any problems with a printer in linux. Linux uses CUPS and CUPS is made by apple, so, I thought, most of printers are supported by it.

And you could also search for drivers on manufacturer's page, there'll be linux version.

I've never had problems with Brother printers, but like you that was years ago. Nowadays I rarely print and when I do I do it from my Android on a brother laser printer

I would always go for a laser printer if possible. Also, I believe it's still possible to reset the toner on brother printers via a button combination so that they last twice as long (albeit with lower quality)

I am happy with my consumer Epson product over WiFi. Maybe https://openprinting.github.io/ is helpful.

I have an HP LaserJet P1005 from 15 years ago which mostly works fine with Hplip except that every once in a while it asks me to reinstall the proprietary plugin needed. I'm taking note of how other brands seem to work better but to be honest I print so little since I digitally sign everything that once I run out of toner it's far cheaper for me to have something printed in a shop than to replace it.

We have purchased a very cheap Epson EcoTank ET-2815 about a year ago and it has earned its price already. Please note that this printer is for sure not a good Photo-printer, but it is fast and colorful enough for our needs. The printer is really "cheap" in a sense of dubious material (thin plastic) and bad design (e.g. compared to my ancient HP LaserJet). But it has the EcoTank, which means the color refill does not cost very much.

Also on the positive side it did work attached to my Raspi print server, after compiling drivers from epson-inkjet-printer-escpr_1.7.20.tar.gz and adding it with CUPS and the following settings:

We can print from all PCs and mobile devices to it with no issues. Never have tried to scan from Linux with it (it is printer-scanner-copier)

EDIT: on Debian 11 the printer worked with no extra efforts directly attached and installed with CUPS, only on Raspian the driver was broken and I had to compile my own from Epson website.

I had put off for a long time switching distro's because of issues I had historically (like 10 years ago) with printers, setting up cups, jumping through hoops.

However, was forced into it recently after my volume of 3rd party repo's killed my Mint upgrade so switched to Kubuntu. Was honestly dreading the printer side of things.

Went to epson site (I have a cheap xp247 wireless multifunction). grabbed the printer driver, the scanner stuff (all .deb files), installed them

entered the ip of my printer, BOOM.. wireless scanning and printing just like that. Boy, things have really improved since last time i tried to set one up

My partner's crappy HP all in one that charges insane prices for ink seems to work fine whenever I rarely have to use it.

Well, I've used multiple Epson and even a HP WiFi printer. And all of them worked perfectly. Way better than on Windows. In the worst cases, I had to choose the driver from a list and that's it. In some instances, I even have ink level indicators, and options to clean the printer. It's really cool

My Pantum P2500W has been seamless across many distros. Its a cheap little laser printer that costs usually sub-$100.

I recently bought a cheap Canon laser printer and it worked great over USB and CUPS. I setup wifi printing through a windows VM and now wifi printing also works in Linux over CUPS. It was way less painful than I had anticipated.

HP printers seem to work and even have dedicated linux software, like a print manager

I have been using a few Brother printers with Linux. They worked well with USB connection and LAN (both ethernet and wifi). Same with the scanning features

Brother laser printers work great on the network.