I’m tired of windows.
The software bloat, the ever increasing hardware requirements, the busted updates, the subscription everything, the costs…

I have Linux Mint running on a few older Dell laptops and PCs and like it.

And I realize I’ll probably need at least one MS device to maintain a couple things.

But what I need right now is a lead on a good network attached printer/scanner that is Linux compatible.
Printers are no problem, but finding a network accessible scanner for Linux has proven difficult.

I’ve tried to make the switch a couple times and this has always the hang up.

Now I have extra incentive because since upgrading to Win11, my old Dell printer is incompatible with everything. Well, it’ll print, but the scanner side is inaccessible.

Anyway…suggestions?
What has worked for y’all?

Take a look at Brother. They are great at software support for their printers / scanners.

https://help.brother-usa.com/a...er-%28deb%29---linux

I’ll second Brother. I have a MFC-9330CDW printer that works well. I’ve gotten it going in several distros. One of those being Mint.

I use a brother printer/scanner was plug and play.

Look into CUPS, print server software for most operating systems including Mint. It supports any printer that understands the IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) which most network-attached printers allow. You only have to run it on one machine on your network, it re-publishes the printer to all your other connected devices, and translates the print stream into something the printer will understand.

I have run CUPS setups where the printer could only be connected-to via USB or a parallel port (goes back a ways). Worked fine then, I'd expect it to work now, but you might have difficulty finding a PC with a parallel port! If I were to do something similar, I'd probably front the printer with a cheap SBC running FreeBSD, Linux, or Android. You could probably use an old mobile phone for this purpose, how many of those are lying around?

We’ve used the HP Officejet for years with MacOS successfully. HP also actively supports Linux.

https://developers.hp.com/hp-l...imaging-and-printing

Mint is downstream from Ubuntu so this should be a reasonable walk through.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/...ner-on-ubuntu-linux/

Cool. I’ll look into this stuff.

I hadn’t heard of CUPS. That sound interesting. So it’s like an old jet direct/server that we used to set between a LAN and “not necessarily LAN attachable” hardware?

quote:

Originally posted by hudr:
Cool. I’ll look into this stuff.

I hadn’t heard of CUPS. That sound interesting. So it’s like an old jet direct/server that we used to set between a LAN and “not necessarily LAN attachable” hardware?

Sort of the same concept except much more capable/universal.

The limiting factor might be the available connection interfaces on the printer you want to integrate, the computer running CUPS has to be able to communicate via this interface. If it is something like a parallel port, options have become limited.