Years ago, Brother printers seemed to be one of the few feasible options. What’s the printer landscape like today? Are there any plug and play options that aren’t part of some ink scam?
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.
This is the correct answer. IPP Everywhere support is often advertised as AirPrint and sometimes as Mopria, which all means that it will work with CUPS without extra drivers.
In fact, with the upcoming version 3, CUPS will drop direct support for non-IPP printers.
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.
Not quite. I use an Epson Ecotank on Debian without issues and ink ist cheap.
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: Attached to Debian 11 amd64 PC the printer worked with no extra efforts, simply added with CUPS. Only on Raspian 11 the driver was broken and I had to compile my own with source from Epson website.
