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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 ke

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.

calcifer 6y ago
What sort of problems do you have with the 32bit drivers (beyond "I don't like it")?
- boplicity 6y ago
  I haven't thought about drivers in a long time. It "just works" on MacOS.
- syntheticnature 6y ago
  I think you meant to reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25010133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25010133
  - calcifer 6y ago
    Indeed I did, thanks.
- chongli 6y ago
  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!
  - wolfgang42 6y ago
    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.
    - rational_indian 6y ago
      I think brlaser and brscan are the modern replacements.
ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
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.

calcifer 6y ago

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

boplicity 6y ago
I haven't thought about drivers in a long time. It "just works" on MacOS.
syntheticnature 6y ago
I think you meant to reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25010133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25010133
- calcifer 6y ago
  Indeed I did, thanks.
chongli 6y ago
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!
- wolfgang42 6y ago
  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.
  - rational_indian 6y ago
    I think brlaser and brscan are the modern replacements.

ObsoleteNerd 6y ago

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.