Hi, CS DBA wrote: > I'm having a tough time finding a color laser printer (preferably with > duplex capability) that works well with Fedora 24 / KDE. I've tried a > few, even downloaded a set of brother printer RPM's but no luck. > > Anyone have any recommendations per a printer and what driver you are > using? I would recommend staying clear of anything that requires proprietary drivers. Those may (or may not!) work now, but can always become a headache in the future, if Fedora evolves and the manufacturers no longer keep their binary blobs up to date. You have already had your bad experiences with Brother binary drivers, that is just the kind of user experience to expect from proprietary drivers, unfortunately. Therefore, I would NOT recommend the 2 models other posters have recommended so far, explicitly pointing to proprietary manufacturer drivers. Unfortunately, there is probably no manufacturer with 100% coverage by Free (as in Free Software) drivers out there. HP has a manufacturer driver (HPLIP) that is Free Software, BUT there are some printer models that "require a plugin", which means in practice that HPLIP serves only as a shell around the binary blob "plugin" implementing the actual protocol. (I looked at the code using the "plugin", it does not do much more than dlopening the "plugin" and having it do all the work.) So you will want to check the list of supported devices: http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/supported_devices/ and check the "Driver plug-in" entry hidden in the last table "Other information": it should say "None", or at least "Optional" (in which case I recommend to NOT accept the plugin installation). Where the plugin is required for HPLIP, there may be third-party drivers available, in particular, the foo2* drivers (which are packaged in Fedora, though the author doesn't like how they are packaged, because some printers require firmware that you have to get separately, his build scripts download it during the build process if you build them from source), see the printer list at: http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/ (including the list of printers supported by other related drivers). Though, quality-wise, they are probably not as reliable as HPLIP. (The fact that the author does not recommend using the packaged version is a clear indicator of that.) Another good bet is to get a printer that speaks PostScript or PCL natively: PostScript is supported by CUPS basically without any driver (you only need a PPD (printer description) file; worst case, you can use the PPD for a similar printer, it doesn't even have to be from the same manufacturer), PCL is supported by several drivers including HPLIP. But you have to be careful: Some manufacturers claim "PostScript support" when it is really only in the driver, not in the actual printer. So you need to look carefully to find out what the printer really talks in hardware. Then there is also the Gutenprint project: http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/ which has (usually) high-quality drivers for many printers of various manufacturers. (The project was renamed from Gimp-Print to Gutenprint years ago, because it works with all CUPS applications, not just GIMP, but the old name still shows up in several places on their project page.) So it is worth checking their supported printer list: http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/p_Supported_Printers.php Gutenprint is of course packaged in Fedora. There are of course various drivers (of varying quality) for other printers. You can check the OpenPrinting database: http://www.openprinting.org/printers but do not just trust the quality rating (in the past, they required the ratings to actually be for the Free Software driver, this is unfortunately no longer the case, users give "Perfectly" ratings with all sorts of proprietary blobs, and they do not discard those anymore), but actually check the "recommended driver" that is given to see whether it is actually a Free Software driver (ideally, one that is already included in Fedora). If you are going to get a multi-function printer (MFP), you will also want to check the list of scanners supported by SANE: http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html for it. (Note that HPLIP also includes a SANE driver for its multi-function printers, but that may require a plugin too, and in fact, does even more often than for printing. So there, check the list of supported devices for HPLIP, which you should check anyway for the printing part, too. I think that unfortunately, for color lasers, all the current multi-function models require a proprietary plugin at least for scanning; I checked this recently for a user who was in search of a color laser MFP. You have been warned.) It would be a waste to buy a MFP and then find out that you can only use it for printing. I do not have a concrete model to recommend to you, because the printers I have used so far were all inkjets (several years old HP models, working with HPLIP without a proprietary plugin). I hope this helps, Kevin Kofler _______________________________________________ kde mailing list -- kde@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to kde-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
