I have a Brother HL2270DW printer, does duplexing and wireless, looks nice, doesn't take up much space. Got it on sale at NewEgg for less than $100. Replaced the toner cartridge once with a third-party brand. It's been great.
I use Debian and Ubuntu, and the driver has mostly worked very well.
However, there have been a few times when, after upgrading Ubuntu, which upgrades CUPS, some very obscure thing in the driver was incompatible with something else in the chain of commands used to print a job (ghostscript, etc--there's quite a pipeline), and suddenly the duplexing would print an extra, blank page between pages, and every page was offset by about an inch to the side. I was able to find a bug report on Launchpad and manually edit one of the driver files myself to work around it, but it took several hours of fiddling, and it's nothing any "average user" would be able to do.
And, sadly, Brother hasn't released updated drivers for this printer in many years; they don't seem to care about keeping up with newer versions of Ubuntu or CUPS, etc.--at least, not for this printer.
And I haven't been able to get it to print on envelopes correctly, no matter what I tried. It just prints as if it's printing on a normal sheet of paper.
So, anyway, whenever it needs replacing, I will probably try to get a printer that just does plain old PostScript. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that if a printer correctly handles PS, then basically anything can print to it correctly, without having to worry about arcane, manufacturer-specific drivers.
I use Debian and Ubuntu, and the driver has mostly worked very well.
However, there have been a few times when, after upgrading Ubuntu, which upgrades CUPS, some very obscure thing in the driver was incompatible with something else in the chain of commands used to print a job (ghostscript, etc--there's quite a pipeline), and suddenly the duplexing would print an extra, blank page between pages, and every page was offset by about an inch to the side. I was able to find a bug report on Launchpad and manually edit one of the driver files myself to work around it, but it took several hours of fiddling, and it's nothing any "average user" would be able to do.
And, sadly, Brother hasn't released updated drivers for this printer in many years; they don't seem to care about keeping up with newer versions of Ubuntu or CUPS, etc.--at least, not for this printer.
And I haven't been able to get it to print on envelopes correctly, no matter what I tried. It just prints as if it's printing on a normal sheet of paper.
So, anyway, whenever it needs replacing, I will probably try to get a printer that just does plain old PostScript. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that if a printer correctly handles PS, then basically anything can print to it correctly, without having to worry about arcane, manufacturer-specific drivers.