they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early
My brother is newer than yours (the cheapest one I could get that prints on both sides of the paper), and has a setting to toggle how it behaves in low toner mode.
The default is to pause printing until you replace the toner - honestly that’s not entirely wrong. Having the printer run out of toner half way through an important print job could be a disaster.
The alternative mode is to just show a “low toner” warning badge whenever you print a document. That’s what I use, but I also check if it printed properly before closing the document which a lot of people don’t do.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
There are very few printers that don’t work with Linux. Linux has drivers to interface with most of them through whatever means you like, right in the kernel.
That’s one of the reasons my android phone (Linux kernel, remember) is better at finding and queuing up prints on a network printer than any windows machine I’ve ever used.
I just hit share on a document, choose print… And then it just works.
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I was speaking with the all-in-one types, that includes scanners and fax machines.
Most printer companies don’t make their drivers work well with Linux (or at the very least used to not), and even Brother was in that same boat early on.
But as of late they’re much better, so when you run a Brother installer for the drivers it’s just all installs and works now, where in the past you had to worry about 32 bit versus 64 bit libraries in the OS and how they interact with the brother drivers, etc., etc.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 8 months ago
I have an MFC-9340 and have also run into this problem. The drivers available in cups allow me to either print two-sided in b&w, or print single-sided in color (at least for the drivers that work at all with the printer). I finally broke down and installed the binary from Brother to get it working fully, but it’s annoying that I can’t just use a generic driver with this printer.