Conversely, I have a recent-ish (<5yrs old) Brother inkjet printer that’s waiting to be dumped to recycling because it arbitrarily decided that it didn’t ever need to be discoverable or respond to any print requests one day, and so even though there was nothing mechanically wrong with it, even hooking up a Raspberry Pi to run CUPS over USB didn’t fix the issue – because Brother explicitly refuses to publish drivers for the Raspberry Pi, and their inkjet drivers are proprietary.
I’ve since replaced it with the best-reviewed Epson printer I could find that supports a generic PCL driver, so that if Epson ever loses their minds in the way Brother did, I can fall back on an open-source implementation of good ol’ PCL.
Conversely, I have a recent-ish (<5yrs old) Brother inkjet printer that’s waiting to be dumped to recycling because it arbitrarily decided that it didn’t ever need to be discoverable or respond to any print requests one day, and so even though there was nothing mechanically wrong with it, even hooking up a Raspberry Pi to run CUPS over USB didn’t fix the issue – because Brother explicitly refuses to publish drivers for the Raspberry Pi, and their inkjet drivers are proprietary.
I’ve since replaced it with the best-reviewed Epson printer I could find that supports a generic PCL driver, so that if Epson ever loses their minds in the way Brother did, I can fall back on an open-source implementation of good ol’ PCL.
That thing’s given us no issues so far.