Any time a relative asks me which printer they should buy, I tell them to get the cheapest Brother laser printer they can find without wifi. I mostly do this to save myself support calls, but it's also the printer I use in my own house.
A few years ago I plugged it into a Raspberry Pi so that I could share it via CUPS to all the family's PCs. This has also worked almost without problems (the exception being it had to be reconfigured a few times on my wife's Apple laptop). A year or so later I realised that while connected to wifi I can print from my Android phone. The phone found the CUPS server and the printer without me doing anything at all and it has never gone wrong.
Besides the fact that I never printed anything from my phone.
It literally required reinstallation (not restart!) to print again, every time, on Windows.
It needed an HP account to be able to scan. Locally.
I just chucked it out and got a USB Brother.
You can use Windows apps to do the scanning without creating an HP account.
Maybe because I’m used to the MacOS world but that should be the default first thing you try is do nothing and let the OS handle it.
Neither the on-device or OS mediated error messages explained this. I only figured it out from other angry users on reddit.
How was my mom supposed to have figured this out? She didn't know that her printer had updated itself a few days earlier. She doesn't even know what a firmware update is.
In a world of class action suites over batteries, chargers, keyboards, etc., why isn't HP being sued?