All-in-one laser printer recommendation

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Juan R. de Silva <juan.r.d.silva at gmail.com>

|  Yes, you need to use Brother's drivers for it. 
| But what's the problem with it, if they are always available and easy to 
| install?

1.  At some point, Brother will stop supporting the printer.  The
printer may still be otherwise useful.  I've had that happen with a
bunch of devices.  Usually it is Windows support that is dropped; the
community-created Linux drivers continue working.  But AMD and nVidia
drop support from their Linux drivers.  (My first laser printer lasted
for a dozen years or more.)

2.  Bugs leave us helpless.  There have been Brother bugs.  Scanner
problems sometimes remain mysterious.

3.  Open source drivers have the potential of being better than
proprietary ones.

4.  With a network printer, you want all your computers to have
drivers.  In our household, that's a lot of installation compared with
"let the distro do the work".  And it gets repeated with every update
of the drivers and every version of the distro.

We've had a number of Brother lasers that did not need proprietary
drivers.