Yeah, I'd agree that the only hard rule in looking for printers would be to avoid inkjet. If you don't use them, they dry up and waste very expensive ink. If you do use them, they use very expensive ink and then clog, wasting expensive ink. Then there are all the DRM issues with the very expensive cartridges which are either only partially filled or report being empty while still having a lot left in them.

Laser printers would be the way to go, but since my SOHO printer is quite old, I can't use it as a recommendation as the landscape has changed a lot. As far as I know, most laser printers come with larger black toner cartridges relative to the cyan, magenta, and yellow ones. They should all be independently replaceable though. It might not be possible but get one without networking, or at least one which still supports USB connections. Then if you have one computer you can connect to that. But if you more computers to deal with, you can set up CUPS on a Raspberry Pi (or similar) and have a print server for that LAN.

I tried to use refilled cartridges for my Deskjet 2544. I gave up because 50% were shit. HP replacement are (really TOO) expensive, but it works. Then we had to be restrictive in printing (paper and print color are an environmental mess) just to overcome the huge pricing.

^^^^
This

Always had good luck with Brother printer and Linux, they also last a long time and its easy to find third party ink or toner that is much cheaper and lasts as long as the original or longer. Been using this one for quite a few years now, since 2010 or 2011 I think: Brother HL-2270DW

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Sorry, I missed this info earlier. So that mitigates the CUPS suggestion I made earlier.

Printers and, especially their drivers, are sure a pain and have been for decades.

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Both my newish Brother B&W laser printers (HL-L6200DW & HL-L2360DW) are automatically recognized on debian 12 and other debian derivative distributions. My guess is that at least their newer network capable printers are supported by IPP everywhere but not sure about the USB only models. Of course it also depends on the distribution and what version of cups as well as avahi.

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Both my Brother Laser printer (no longer made) and Brother Ink Tank printer were auto recognized in KUbuntu. I was literally 'shocked' after installing the latest LTS and the printers were 'there'. Not used to that! Took all fun out of install to not have to fight with printer drivers . I chose to hard-wired (etherent cable) to the printers to a switch rather than use WiFi. Work great.

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That was good advice. I went through 3 different inkjet printers in two years due to lack of use and ink drying and plugging the nozzles.
My laser is still going strong after 5 years.

I am a big fan of the CUPS switch to driverless printing with the everywhere driver for networked printers.

I believe the driver has been supported since CUPS 2.2.2.
Avahi is not a strict dependency. The required IPP URI can be constructed from information from running nmap.

@Hazel - When I tested this with my Brother MFC-J825DW, I found that I did not need the Brother drivers and so did not require 32bit library support on Slackware64-15.0.

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Your skills as a linux sentry are truly extra ordinary and deserving of a cooked t bone thrown your way. As I've said before here, (decades could pass yet) nothing goes unnoticed on LQ, not even google's prying eyes could not match some of the dozen LQ watchmen we have roaming here. I'm approaching the decade mark myself so will stay on my toes.

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Hang on... Does that mean that not every query is genuine and there might be AI bots here? So, how do I know who's real? It might just be me and a load of bots?

BTW new PC with Ubuntu installed recognised my very very very elderly Brother printer without any effort at all on my part (DCP 7030). It doesn't realise that it is also a scanner though so I'll have to do something about that. Ironically, I'd fixed that issue on a different machine a couple of weeks ago so I know it's a couple of minutes to fix at most.So, if I had to buy a new printer, I'd go Brother or some other organisation who accepts the existence of Linux. Just because...

Well, this is weird. I just tried the cups admin interface in my new AntiX installation and it recognised my usb-connected Brother HL-1110 and printed out a test page on demand. And I hadn't copied over the proprietary filters that I use with Slackware. How the heck does that work??

Magic, is it not?
You probably have an Avahi enabled CUPS.
CUPS uses Avahi to find available printers, then queries the printer to build a PPD file that is used for printing.

The test page includes the following lines:
Update: brlaser is available as a cups driver for Brother printers in Debian (on which AntiX is based). https://packages.debian.org/bullseye...driver-brlaser. The HL-1110 is named there as a compatible model. Presumably this completely replaces the proprietary 32-bit filters, rendering a 32-bit libc unnecessary. allend (#23) is probably using the same driver.

Update2:I found the ppd in /etc/cups/ppd, dated this morning 6:47.

Hi,

i have had good results with OKI, they have PPD-files for most of their black and white printers.
I had a small one with a ledbar instead of laser, did work very well.

Regards,
Jan

I used HP printers with Linux for about 20 years but recently switched to Canon and have had a better-than-expected experience. You might consider Canon as an option.