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.
My brother works great, but check here for whatever model you looking at
Brother laser printers are great. As long as you get one that supports Postscript (Brother calls this BR-Script), PCL5 or PCL6. You can see this under the “emulations” printing specs on a printer model page. PostScript and PCL both have fully open source implementations so you’ll usually be able to just use built-in CUPS gutenprint or foomatic drivers. I also recommend ethernet (wired or wireless) and not usb.
Do not get one that only says “GDI” emulations which is Windows based and can be really painful to deal with.
Brother printers are well known for working well within Linux. Personally, I have a MFC-J4335DW and it works very well with the generic IPP Everywhere driver. Depending on your distro, you may have to enable avahi-daemon yourself in order to get network printer auto-detection to work, but after that it just works. Even the scanning portion of the all-in-one works well!
On another note, Brother laser printers are a really good buy. I have a used one that won’t die and still on its original fuser assembly. Something like this from Amazon should work gangbusters. Just get an Asurion warranty just in case but Brothers are workhorses. And indeed the MFC-L2690DW does work with Linux.
