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This is where Brother laser printers are/were supposed to be superior. Affordable ink cartridges, refillable, good capacity, no DRM.

But I upgraded the printer driver some months ago (on macOS) and Hey, Presto! No more functioning printer.

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Why do you need to use a proprietary software driver? Brother printers support CUPS.

I had a Brother laser printer for a very long time and printed a TON of paper with it. But it finally gave up the ghost during the COVID supply-chain meltdown and when looking at new Brother laser printers I discovered that they now have a much wider range of offerings and some are clearly not friendly. So the generic advice no longer applies - you have to be careful which one you buy.

Now, because of those supply chain issues they were all marked up to exorbitant prices; I ended up getting an Epson EcoTank thing from Costco with no markup and a bonus extra (quite large) pack of ink. We’ve been very happy with it and the ink isn’t actually very expensive at all. Given the electricity usage difference between laser and inkjet, it might even be cheaper per page.

Do you have an example of an unfriendly model from Brother?

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