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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

I've had a Brother HL-2170W for at least a decade. Bought a new toner cartridge once. The current one has been "low" for a couple of years.

The printer just keeps working. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it lased another decade.

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Yeah I've had a MFC-L2740DW for something like 7 years now, and it's an absolute beast. It was like AUD$250 or something on sale, does printing/scanning/copying/etc, has wifi, and works on all our devices flawlessly (windows, mac, linux, phones, tablets). I've bought toner I think once in that entire time.

What sort of problems do you have with the 32bit drivers (beyond "I don't like it")?

I think you meant to reply here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25010133

Indeed I did, thanks.

32-bit drivers? Most laser printer drivers are just a PPD file. You don’t need to install any executables or whatever. Heck, on a lot of printers you can just use Bonjour printing without installing any drivers at all!

The cheaper Brother printers don’t have a PostScript engine, so you need a “driver” (really a CUPS filter) to rasterize the image and prepend the appropriate PCL commands. In the official Linux driver package, at least for my printer, this comes in the form of a rather complicated shell script that hooks together some binary blobs, and if you don’t have all the right 32-bit support libraries it just mysteriously fails to produce any output while CUPS reports that the print job completed successfully.

Fortunately someone has made an open-source equivalent which is much less complicated and seems to work just fine.

I think brlaser and brscan are the modern replacements.

I haven't thought about drivers in a long time. It "just works" on MacOS.

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