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.
I got the HL-L2325DW last year. Connecting it to the WiFi using WPS was really easy. Making the desktop see it was a bit of trial and error, but it was partially thanks to the PDF viewer I was using, so I’d recommend printing from a well established viewer like Okular or the web browser, at least for the first use.
I don’t remember having to download any drivers manually from their website btw, I just chose it from the list when setting up a new printer. This process might change with the distro and desktop environment though, I’m using Kubuntu.
In fact, if you’re a bit lucky, the printer might even show up as a “discovered device” after you connect it to your network, even with a suggested driver and connection so you just need to press next.
Kubuntu is great for out of the box printer detection, as are Fedora and Mint, in my experience.
Some distros may force you through some obstacles though, and in my experience (opensuse) you may have to allow mdns/ipp protocols in your firewall rules for local device discovery and communication.
Apart from that I’d argue that setting up a modern printer on Linux is pretty much plug n play nowadays, since most should support driverless printing at this point.