Thanks. This is useful info.

Brother's site says my printer does support AirPrint. And through the printer's internal web server, I can see under Network -> Protocol that AirPrint is there and enabled.

I have the binary blob driver installed, so I guess this explains why two entries appear for this printer under Printer settings in Ubuntu.

So, a minor mystery is solved, and I now see that I have the option of removing this driver.

I just last week got a new Brother printer and went through the process of installing the proprietary driver, which for some reason requires the 32 bit version of libc. I had ignored the "Airprint" option because I assumed it had something to do with wireless printing. Apparently it did originally, but now it has more to do with driverless printing. So yes, thank you.

I have a Brother MFC printer on my network and my Ubuntu has it popping up automatically after install. No drivers were needed. Installing on Windows takes more work.

Ah! Yay!

And basically every printer natively supports PostScript and PCL which are "almost generic" but can come with a ppd file that has your printers specific options and error codes.

And I'm seeing lots of printers come with native PDF/DVI support which is nice.

For features other than printing A4 business documents in Fast quality? Photos, CD-R, model making decals etc often require proprietary Windows drivers to do right.

For printing academic research papers in reverse page order to hand staple and read, indeed you don’t need drivers.

Is there Linux support for printing to AirPrint printers though?