This “just use linux” mentality is peak broke-brain logic.
You think spending an hour every day troubleshooting and googling how to fix it is some badge of honor? Congrats, you saved $0 and burned the only free hour you had after work. Hope the "Freedom" was worth it.
Linux isn’t free. It costs time, energy, and attention — the three things high-performers guard with their life. Compile time, Maintenance, debugging, dependancies, cleanup — you’re bleeding hours to save pennies. That’s not frugality, that’s time poverty.
You’re not a developer. You’re a tired guy distro hopping at 10pm convincing yourself it’s “self care.” Meanwhile someone else paid $100 for Windows, finished a deck, hit the gym, and got 8 hours of sleep. But hey, you configured your system by hand. King shit.
And don’t even start with the “but privacy!” cope. 90% of y’all using Linux aren’t toppling goverments or hacking banks. You’re watching Youtube, checking Gmail, Twitter, and scrolling the same niche subreddit every night. You’re not optimizing for privacy, you’re optimizing for feeling morally superior while wasting time.
Time is the only real flex. You get more of it by buying it back. If that costs $100 for Windows, that’s a steal. If you’re in any field where leverage matters — CAD, Excel, Adobe — and you’re still compiling Linux from scratch like it’s 1999, you’re not serious.
This isn’t about being rich. It’s about understanding what moves the needle. High-output people don’t micromanage their PCs — they outsource. You want to be productive? Stop pretending Linux is a virtue. It’s not. It’s a time sink.
I installed Mint on my wife's computer last week, and we have had problems getting the printer to print, and then to scan. I've installed the manufacturer's driver a couple of times and it seems to do those functions okay, but some features still don't work.
For what it's worth I have a printer that won't work on windows no matter what I do. But it just works on Linux, copy and scan with no effort on my part.
It would seem weird it isn't supported, but also weird that you are trying to find manufacture drivers. Shouldn't be needed.
Without the manufacturer's drivers, I couldn't even print a page of text.
What brand printer? What functions? Just wanted to know what to expect.
It's a Brother B&W laser with integrated scanner. About 6 years old, so it should be fully supported. We can't view toner levels or scan from the printer (press a button on the printer to start a scan and have it automatically accepted by the computer. I have installed the separate driver for this functionality, but it isn't working).
We haven't yet tried some features like double-sided printing.
Weird.
I have a brother black and white 75 page thing that just works. Never had any issues with it until I installed a HP printer on my phone.
Does it do scan to FTP? For my Brother MFC device, I spun up a write-only FTP server to drop scanned documents into a network share. That made them immediately accessible to any machine on my network.
Shit just worked.
Seems printer drivers are amongst the worst. I had a brother inkjet printer/scanner combo a while back. Pretty much the same issues. Also what they call driver and offer on their website really sucks. Now I have one from Epson and that just pops up on Mint (and other distros) and I can print right away, no driver installation necessary. And it even started reporting toner levels after some update. Sadly I can't recommend the printer either, I had several other issues with the thing itself. But this kind of roulette with hardware is really annoying. And I believe it's really pronounced with those consumer printer/scanner combination devices. The expensive business printers regularly work way better, at least that's what I've seen.