I have recently bought an office class Brother printer. It works flawlessly on Linux; but it doesn’t work flawlessly on Macs, and I’ve found bug reports for the same thing going back to 2015.

When you use the Mac OS built in “scanner” app to scan to PDF, it will scan in color even when you ask it to scan in B&W; unfortunately, this will confuse the app and the pdf will be corrupted.

The recommended workaround is “scan in color” (which I do, and then use Ghostscript to convert to b&w), but it’s ridiculous.

That said, as far as quality, speed, robustness and reliability, this is the best printer/scanner/fax machine I ever used. And it works perfectly well on Linux.

My wife has a mac and it just has a terrible experience with our brother laser. The print queue just says "cannot connect to printer" but I can open up the printer's web server, use the printer setting to check toner level &c. Then a few hours or days later it prints spontaneously.

I thought it might be bonjour not working well over wifi, but the problem persists even when I assign the printer an IP address manually. I'm stumped.

What is the "office class" printer you have trouble with?

I've never seen this issue with my Brother MFC-2740DW using "Image Capture" on my Mac (which I assume you are referring to as the built-in scanner app). It's worked flawlessly for me (as did my previous Brother laser printer/scanner).

An MFC-L3730CDN .

I am still using Mojave; I was unaware of the "Image Capture" app - I opened the printer icon, which has a "Scanner" button on the right when you have a multifunction printer - but it appears to be the same underlying implementation, and it has the same bug, described here:

https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&pro...

perhaps it was fixed in Catalina; the page I linked (with the exact kind of corruption I just tested through Image Capture) is from 2012...

By "scanner" app do you mean Preview? My several-year-old Brother laser printer works fine in B&W mode on Catalina. Maybe this is just a thing with newer models.

TIL: Preview can import from the scanner.

I was using the scanner window available from the printer icon associated with the multifunction printer. Another comment mentioned the standalone "Image Capture.app" which was also news to me.

However, all three are using the same underlying implementation. Scanning in color works. Scanning to JPEG works. However my preferred scanning mode (300dpi, A4, to PDF) produces the garbled image seen here[0], and apparently has been doing so since at least 2012 ...

My impression is that preview/scanner/imagecapture all trust the printer to do the conversion to PostScript/PDF, but somehow don't manage to tell it to use B&W instead of color -- it seems like r/g/b pixels are treated as individual gray pixels.

[0] https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=hk&lang=en&pro...

I've been using my Brother laser printer for something like a decade now. I bought toner for it once in like 2013. Never had any problems. The linux drivers are through a third party repo but they work great.

In the days when you're expected to buy a new cell phone every two years and a new computer every four it feels like black magic that it just ... sits there ... and.. works.

After the fiasco with an HP InkJet MFP, we went with Brother. Instead of constantly using steam to clean clogged jets, it just... works. Much less fiddly. The missus mostly prints from her iPad, phone, or Windows laptop, I haven't used it much from Linux.

In the big printer thread referenced, the consensus was that they do not work flawlessly with Linux.