EDIT: I purchased the Brother L2690DW on a Clearance deal from Walmart and so far it has been a breeze using it between my Linux desktop and laptop.
My faithful Brother laser printer just poo’d itself. And since I’ve not purchased a new printer with additional features since I switched to full-time Linux, I thought I’d better ask around to make sure the document scanning, copy, fax (maybe once a year if that), and other features will work correctly.
The printer I have no worked without issue with Pop!_OS. Very straight forward plug in play other than a weird quirk with scaling when printing from Firefox built-in PDF handler vs the Document Viewer that ships with Pop.
Does anyone have any advice on potential pitfalls to avoid? I’d like to stick with brother because they seem to be the least evil of the printer corps, but I’m open to other suggestions.
You don’t need extra scanning software. Get a printer that can scan to email or to a network share. My 7 year old Brother MFC9330CDW can do both. I’m sure if you look for office grade equipment you can find that feature set.
I am not a big fan of this, because you then rely on the scanner manufacturer to produce good quality results.
I scan everything using VueScan and that has a special mode for text documents. A single page with OCR ends up being about 25kb as PDF. It removes folding edges, sharpens the letters, etc.
If that software gets new features, my scanning experience improves automatically, even though I still use the same scanner for 10 years now.
With relying on the firmware, I would have long ago stopped getting updates and I either was ok with the results or I could throw away the whole device.
Just as people here recomment to separate printing from scanning, I recomment to separate the hardware and software.
You make a good point. I think it also comes down to the use case. For me, scanning is seldom so it doesn’t make sense to give desk space to a dedicated scanner. My MFP is a bit bulky so I also don’t keep it on my desk within arms reach. It would feel tedious to walk up to it, load my documents, then go back to my desk to initiate the scan, only to have to go back to it to retrieve my scanned documents. It is much simpler to walk up, push the scan, grab my documents, and walk away.
If scanning is something you do frequently then it definitely has its advantages to use dedicated software with a scanner at your desk. I never heard of VueScan but I’ll check it out since I work in IT and occasionally run into people who prefer to do a pull scan.