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.
Don’t. You’d probably be fine with Ubuntu or Fedora since they’re officially supported by Brother, but if you want to use something different, preper to struggle… a lot
I tried to set up the DCP-7055W on Arch before just giving up and using my phone
Did you check the wiki ? If you look that model up on
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS/Printer-specific_problems you check the wiki ?
And click on brlaser (the default driver) you’ll find a comment pointing to a fork of the driver
https://github.com/Owl-Maintain/brlaser
Hope that helps. If you’d already gone through that then sorry to waste your time
Wow. Thanks. Didn’t knew that. I tried for hours but could only find a manual installation guide for the property drivers that dint work . Will try this out
No prob.
In my opinion always check the arch wiki if you’re having problems, even if you’re not running Arch, it’s a gobsmackingly good repository of linux knowledge
I did but I only found a different article that is related to that issue but straight up doesn’t work for this printer
Oh, and it’s in German and hasn’t been updated in a few years