> I am great friend of "Brother" printers. They are cheap and reliable and they
> are well supported by linux. Brother is offering deb packages for installing
> or a linu script, which is downloading and installing these packages
> automatically.
Of course, that means you're at the mercy of Brother providing the
drivers which work for your printer&computer and those deb packages
typically aren't as nicely integrated into your Debian system as if
they'd been packaged by Debian.
E.g. do they provide armhf builds? Are they for Ubuntu? Debian?
Stable? Testing? Sid? Oldstable? Do they risk messing up other parts
of your config? Can you determine that they can't send confidential
info back to Brother or act as puppets after they've been hacked
because of an undisclosed security hole somewhere?
If the drivers (print&scan) are not distributed in Debian's main
archive, I can't recommend it.
> Before you buy: Be sure, the manufacturer is sopporting linux.
Where "supporting" means that it provides code as Free Software, so it
can be adapted to any other OS and architecture you like.
Luckily, nowadays most printers support the standard APIs for
"driverless" printing and scanning, so the nasty proprietary code is
confined to the actual printer, but you might still prefer to put that
printer on a separate non-routed subnetwork so *you* control it rather
than the manufacturer.
Stefan
