Looking for ratings of all-in-one printers for Linux (Ubuntu in particular)

[Peter Flynn]

On 07/07/18 21:50, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> I know there are probably multiple places where such ratings can be
> found.  Not knowing which are reliable, I'm sort of asking for ratings
> of the ratings, I guess.  Mostly, though, I want ratings of recent
> models, from a Linux/Debian/Ubuntu perspective as opposed to the usual
> Windows slant.  

I'm sure there are lots of places, but from the little I have seen, they
tend to be "10 best printers" type sites. Well-intentioned but rarely
with anything in them you can't get from the specs.

>From a Linux point of view: I have been using HP since forever, and I'
generally happy with them, ever since I dropped my first LaserJet II
from a desk onto a concrete floor unpacking it, picked it up, knocked
the dent out of the paper tray, and it worked perfectly for a decade.

But there are a few bobbles to every printer:

1. CUPS for Linux in the distros naturally tends to lag behind with
drivers, so I always download HPLIP and install that. One of the reasons
for picking HP is that there is active Linux community support. But most
of the time, Linux identifies the printer and installs it without problems.

2. CUPS drivers are Postscript PPD files that are cross-platform, so if
you find yours is out of date, you should in theory be able to copy the
relevant one from an up-to-date system (eg a Mac or even a Windows box
if you can find out where they are hidden :-) and use it to update the
entry in CUPS (http://localhost:631 or /usr/bin/system-config-printer)

3. CUPS and the PPD files have bugs. You may find that certain features
of your printer simply aren't available on Linux because either the
print dialog doesn't have facilities to handle them, or it does but the
PPD file doesn't implement them. This is a PITA. Notoriously, A3/Tabloid
size (twice the size of A4 or Letter) fails spectacularly on big
printers and crops the print image to A4/Letter even though it's feeding
the large size paper: I ended up hand-editing the PPD files to fix it.

4. By far the worst aspect are the applications' print dialogs, which
are uniformly abysmal. They are RIDDLED with bugs, and they are pretty
much all different, so sometimes you have to use a different application
to print a PDF because the one you usually use doesn't provide for the
feature you want. Chromium (mine is "Version 66.0.3359.181 (Official
Build) Built on Ubuntu , running on LinuxMint 18.3 (64-bit)"), for
example, has no A4 paper setting! It *does* have one called "Index card
A4 8.27 × 11.69in" which is a stupendous piece of American bogosity, and
I have no idea where it comes from, because none of my other
applications have it: they all have regular A4. Evince cannot use my
printer's double-sided capability, despite it being installed and
activated, and available in every other application. Qpdfview can't
change the quality setting because there is no such option in its dialog
(used to be but it's not there now). Libre Office's dialog looks like
something from the 1990s. GIMP's is pretty much the right thing, though.

I'm using a HP OfficeJet Pro 7720 printer/scanner right now. Very nice,
but they lied about the large paper: it can print both sides on
A4/Letter but not on A3/Tabloid, which sucks. But it can apparently also
work as a fax machine (what's a fax, Mom?).

Ratings otherwise are not likely to be different between Win/Mac/Lin, as
once it's installed and running, it should behave identically no matter
what computer is sending it jobs.

That's the theory, at least :-)

///Peter