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.
I would look for a printer that supports Web Services for Devices (WSD) or Airscan (eSCL). These protocol allows you setup a scanner without installing a driver.
Here are a couple of starting points for sane-airscan. I discovered it long after I had installed the drivers for my all-in-one.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SANE#Sharing_your_scanner_over_a_network
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jammy/man5/sane-airscan.5.html
https://github.com/alexpevzner/sane-airscan