Tim:
Joking aside, Hewlett Packard, Brother, and Canon, to name just three brands that frequently sell printers and scanners that can be used with Linux.
George N. White III:
Read the software licenses before purchase. Vendors have been moving to licenses that assume no responsibility for bugs and make no claim that you will actually be able use the printer.
Hasn't that always been the case, though? Even when you use the OS they designed it for. Basically the device only ever is known to work in their lab, and anywhere else is a bonus.
It certainly seems that way, considering the appalling headaches it can be to get some printers to work. (On a par with used car sales.)
CUPS is focusing on "driverless printing", e.g., automatic generation of the PPD (Postscript Printer Description). AirPrint is Apple's name for driverless printing from IOS devices. You may not need a printer-specific driver if you find a printer that supports AirPrint.
I'd been toying with that, after recently installing Fedora 36. I've still had moments where prints have failed. At times, Fedora's printer app in has shown the printer is continually "processing" a job, but nothing has happened, or for unknown reasons the printer has "rejected a job." Even when I just tried printing some plain text from VIM.
The inconsistency of it makes it extra hard to try and work out the problem. Though MuseScore still won't print 100% of the time. I'm sick of having to export to PDF and print the PDF file, in an annoying three-step process.