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A comment on The battle for the soul of digital freedom taking place inside your printer. Parent comment

Re:The battle for the soul of digital freedom taking place i... by beojan on Monday November 09, 2020 @12:44PM (#25037336)
> If anything, you’d fear that Brother’s software [e.g. drivers] would suck even worse than everyone else’s; but somehow, it doesn’t.

On Linux it certainly does. For some reason I can use network printing on my Brother laser from Windows and even Android, but not Linux.

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Re:The battle for the soul of digital freedom taking place i... by derefr on Monday November 09, 2020 @02:15PM (#25038535)
See https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/436250 and https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSAirPrint — apparently the AirPrint universal-fallback file format "URF" is patent-encumbered, such that you can't really have a FOSS encoder for it without licensing the patent (just like the MP3 format, until recently.) So OSes that cost money can pay for licenses and so ship encoders, but FOSS OSes cannot.

(I'd nevertheless have expected AirPrint support to exist somewhere in Debian's multiverse repo — but it that doesn't seem to be there. Does nobody have that itch to scratch?)

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Re:The battle for the soul of digital freedom taking place i... by bluGill on Monday November 09, 2020 @04:55PM (#25040429)
Most brother printers just speak PCL or Postscript. You just need to figure out how to make it work. On my printer is means use the right queue as it detects one that doesn't work. Otherwise any PDL will work it seems.
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