I hate that everything now is a subscription service instead of buying it and do whatever you want.
Other than the recent nonsense, this is why I cancelled Netflix and went back to pirating. Content leaves unexpectedly? Not on my Nas.
I’ve taken to de-DRMing any e-books I bought from Amazon for that reason.
Also, the “You can only view this book on 3 devices” – yeah … fuck off.
Calibre + DeDRM plugin + KFX plugin. Perfectly legal too, as long as you aren’t distributing them.
Btw, did you know of Weightless Books and Smashwords?
They may not have as many ebooks as Amazon, but they do offer DRM free ebooks, and may be worth keeping in mind to check before going straight to Amazon.
Thanks. I had a collection from several years ago of Amazon books, though these days it’s my absolute last choice for anything.
This is the way.
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I’ve been buying preowned DVDs off ebay every few weeks or so for the last year. I don’t even bother looking to see if they are available to stream anymore.
Probably cheaper too
But then it’s in DVD quality. Why not just pirate a full quality version?
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DVD isn’t very good quality. I don’t really care and I have a tiny TV, and DVDs still don’t look very good on it.
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The video quality is shit and it’s extremely obvious in my opinion. Even the sound is inferior to a good torrent with Dolby TrueHD/DTS HD sound.
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Why isn’t it fair? No reason you can’t just torrent a 10GB Blu-Ray rip of the movie. It’s free, easy and probably takes less time than going out and buying a DVD.
I would say that side-to-side the quality of Netflix-like streaming is A LOT better, at least when it comes to video. Audio is probably comparable since both DVD’s and streaming services usually use Dolby Digital or Dolby Digital Plus.
What software would that happen to be, supposing it’s not MakeMKV?
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Thanks! I’ve read that VLC can do it before, but I’ll look into giving it another shot sometime. The guides I found weren’t exactly the best, but with the mentioned packages I should be able to better narrow the searches to better guides, I think.
I’m pretty sure handbrake can rip as well as re-encode.
Content leaves unexpectedly? Not on my Nas.
Except when I accidentally rm -rf the media folder but shhhhhhhh
Old school pirating or new school? Last time I remember pirates was like… Napster, Limewire, Kazaa… Then went to TPB before it got raided like 8 times… What’s the current? Is it still torrenting with proxies?
I just got my automated pirating machine set up!
Here’s the wiki for the *arr apps!
- Radarr for movies
- Sonarr for TV shows
- Prowlarr for index management
- Optional Doplarr Discord Bot for requests
Set up your profiles for Radarr/Sonarr to pick the quality of release you want (1080p, min/max file size, etc)
Feed Radarr/Sonarr your qbittorrent info, nzbget & Usenet info
They will automatically search the indexes (I use 1337x for torrents & nzbgeek for Usenet) for the files that fit your parameters, download it, and organize it.
All you have to do is point Plex at the output folders and BAM, automated pirating.
I even took it a step further and set up Doplarr - a Discord bot that handles requests. Now friends/family can ping the bot with their movie/show requests and it’ll sync up to Radarr/Sonarr and add their requests!
Oh, the high seas are very, very busy these days. Still a bit difficult for the non technical user, but there is buried treasure out there.
Non technical users can just use Stremio and a debrid service. Couldn’t be simpler.
Torrents are still around, lots of sites out there for them.
Word on the street is that reddit’s arr slash piracy has a pretty good guide to it in their wiki, including lists of generally trustworthy torrent sources. I of course don’t torrent, because I’m terrified of legal consequences–I just browse shady but technically legal websites to stream my anime
Content leaving isn’t a problem. If they give up some things they have more money to get the rights to other content, and usually by the time it leaves I’ve either watched it or don’t want to. If it’s one of the rare things I want to watch several times, I can just buy it. But cracking down on password sharing is ridiculous. They’ve been functioning fine with people sharing passwords. I bet the current pricing accounts for password sharing. But now people in college can’t be on the family netflix? Pure greed.
This is incredibly annoying for series. Crunchyroll dropped Bleach, a series with over 350 episodes, when I was at episode ~100. A few years ago I started to manually keep track of the episodes I watched, since you lose your progress when they drop it (true for crunchyroll, prime and netflix)
Content leaving is totally a problem. I’ve lost track of the number of times my spouse and I say, “Oh hey, what about we finally watch xyz that’s been in our queue for ages? Yeah that seems like a good one for Friday pizza night! …oh, it’s vanished from our queue, hooray.”
It’s not my full time job to keep tabs on what’s coming and going from the damn entertainment service that I hope to use in my ever dwindling reserves of free time. Especially when there’s alternative means available that are not too difficult to use.
Ready boys? Say it with me, now.
BROTHER👏LASER👏PRINTER👏
I love the fact that brother basically does no marketing as far as I know. They just end up shining like a diamond because they make a generally good product and everyone else around them makes absolute trash.
I only bought a brother printer because of recommendations from reddit. It’s so much better than my old hp inkjet that randomly started asking me to sign in in order to print or scan.
Why tf would I need to sign in to my HP account online in order to print in my own fucking home.
Yep, totally. In the vile shit that printer business is, Brother seems to be the only brand to not be straight-up anti consumer. I have a Brother all-in-one machine at work, it works out of the box on all devices, scans with whatever app, doesn’t push some bullshit custom nagware every time you print and, best of all, ACCEPTS NONAME TONERS without saying a single word of complain. It doesn’t refuse to print, doesn’t even mention that you may get worse quality prints (yeah right). It just prints and we don’t have to think about it and I really appreciate it.
I shit you not I have a brother laser printer that I don’t even know how old it is. My dad pulled out of our basement and cleaned it up and got it running so I could use it in college back in 2009. Skip ahead to 2016 and I’m using it for the table cards at our wedding. It’s 2023 and I still use it from time to time. I’ve only changed the toner once and cleaned it a handful of times, but that sums up the entirety of the maintenance while I’ve had it. I have to plug it into my computer via USB which isn’t so bad. But they don’t have a driver available for OSX anymore so it’s now a PC only printer. I’ll keep using it until it stops working or isn’t compatible with any computer anymore.
I have to plug it into my computer via USB which isn’t so bad.
A $15 Pi Zero W running cups will make it a “wireless printer”. … Although you’ll probably need this site to find one in stock. Don’t pay much more than $15 – those are scalpers.
Regarding the driver, I had the same problem with running my 2005 HP LaserJet 1020 on OSX, but got it running with a built-in driver for a printer in the same build group (LJ 1022, maybe?) so keep that in mind if you haven’t already tried it. I know your printer is Brother and not HP, but there may be a native Brother driver already in the OSX build you can use.
You may lose some advanced driver functionality doing this but most printing doesn’t require it anyway. If it works you’ll be able to print just fine. You can also search your model number and see what Mac printer driver hacks others have come up with, since this was not an uncommon thing with Macs back when I had to do it a few years ago.
But yeah, on the sad day my old HP LJ non-networked non-enshittified printer carks it, I’ll be getting a Brother. No way I give HP my business now.
Sorry to burst your bubble but Brother are also going down the subscription path.
They are but the pricing is ok, £2 a month for 50 pages. The higher end pricing seems to be around 3p per page which is what they price their toners at. They even allow you to rollover a decent amount of print credit. Now, if they had these printers in shops around the country and I could use the credit for those instead of just in my own home, I think it would be a really cool service. The local corner shop charges £2 to print a single sheet of A4 and then 50p per page after that.
Print credit? Fucking theft.
Do they force you to use the subscription model, or do they brick your device if you fail to keep up on payments?
If yes to either, fuck them.
No joke. I had HP and I knew Brother was painfree experience and when I was buying said HP, I completely forgot about them. Few years forward my old HP avoided destruction by sheer luck and my brother’s will to try and tame it. These days I have Brother laser printer and it takes whatever you throw at it without complaints. It’s so obedient am having issues accepting such behavior.
Yes, I have a b&w brother laser/scanner than is 6 to 7 years old and it goes on without any issues (except networking BS at times, but that is likely my problem)
Got it, but which printer if I want to print photos (only a hand full every one or two months)
A printing kiosk or photo shop. They will be so much better quality. If you buy an inkjet and only use it once or twice a month the heads get clogged and you waste loads of ink cleaning it.
You can get them printed for 12 cents a photo at Walmart.
For me it’s so rare that I get them printed at the pharmacy.
What the other guy said. Unless you genuinely need high-quality color photos on a daily or weekly basis, you do not need an inkjet printer. Go to a print shop, get it done right and it’ll be much less headache – but the vast majority of the time I’ve needed something printed, it has been swathes of black text on white paper. And a plain B&W laser printer does that perfectly, with no bullshit. I just recommend Brother because they’re a decent company.
What about Epson? Specifically I’m considering one of the ecotank ones because I need to print stuff for board games like info sheets and so on that need rich colours and designs. Might even look into A3+ printers.
Are those useful? The per-page cost looks crazy low for an inkjet.
Got one of these years ago and it’s still kickin’
I find myself being a printer snob by judging a friend of mine for buying into HPs ink subscription ecosystem.
Epson ink tank. Bought it second hand and downloaded the drivers directly from them. They always want you to buy ink, but thats expected.
But people will think something is wrong when it just works and prints for years without needing any replacements
But never EVER buy a brother inkjet, its the same as all the other brands. You cannot insert bootleg ink anymore. My printer didnt accept any ink apart from the oem.
I’ve moved to Brother from HP. Disappointed by the support for Linux. While the driver exists, a lot of them aren’t packaged. HP does a better job at that.
Every time I think printers can’t get any worse, they get worse.
What’s next? are they going to have to scan your anus to confirm that it’s actually you printing things? I shouldn’t give them ideas.
By the way, I’m sure there’s a way to get into the firmware of the printer to disconnect it from that centralized service.
What’s next?
Printed ads.
Yes
I can picture it, if you don’t want ads printed at the bottom of every page you have to subscribe.
Oh god, imagine your printer waking you up at 3 am as it spits out an ad for Arby’s. But hey, ink at half price!
I would think it plays an ad on the screen and you have to touch it to start so it knows you’re there and doesn’t print until the ad is finished.
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What’s next?
The firmware will ask for a tip every 10 pages.
Please drink a verification can
“PLAYER ATTEMPTING TO STEAL ONLINE PLAY!!!”
mom just walked in the room
I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t. The companies that make printers have always been scamming people with their printers and all the shitty things the printers do.
They’re designed to be shitty and expensive on purpose so that you have to call the guy to fix it and pay an enormous amount of money every time the printer stops working by design.
If they could get away with it, they would have made paper that only works on their printer, and it would be more expensive than normal paper but you have to use it.
Dymo has done that a year ago.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=xzSDJRC0F6c
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
A whole other brown ring of quality
Please drink verification can to continue
Actually, someone already came up with the idea of anal fingerprinting, albeit in another context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
HP printers are now pure scamming dog shit. The HP printer division must have been taken over by criminals.
The first laser printer I worked with was a HP 4L and it was fantastic. So fantastic, that we implemented it company wide, and they were close to immortal. The last of them got killed off when we got follow-me print.
If you want a decent laser printer today, stay clear of HP and get a Brother instead.
Five years ago people were saying the opposite. My old Brother printer broke after 2 ink refills. I’ve had an HP for 2 years now and I’ve never had an issue with it. I was genuinely surprised people were trashing HP lately.
I’ve been hearing brother laser printers are the best workhorses for like 10 years consistently.
Shit that should be fucking illegal, this.
If they were not aware of it before buying then it is illegal.
You don’t actually need to be aware of it. Because you said you were aware of it, when you clicked Accept on the EULA, and on page 62 of the EULA it said they have the right to disable your printer remotely at any time and for any reason.
In decent nations, an EULA is considered an attempt by the seller to, after the purchase, change the terms of the implicit contract which was the sale, so it’s has no legal standing whatsoever.
Absolutelly, the seller can set contract terms before the sale is done (and even then there are lots of limitations to avoid things like bait & switch, so it usualy has to be pretty clear and upfront and there are certain rights that a retail buyer simply cannot loose, even contractually), but never after the sale has been done.
EULAs only have legal standing in a few places, including a few States in the US.
EULAs can very well be legal when you can read tgem before you purchase. Though German courts somewhat assume that nobody reads them, which becomes relevant if somebody puts something very unexpected in there. I would expect that they somehow disable only the ink, not the whole printer. Apparently thi also makes buying used printers a mess.
When ever I am forced to sign something (like some contract addendum for my job) I write that I don’t understand anything on that paper, or now I write it in email before e-signing.
Word
It should be. But you agreed to it. Gotta print out that child support declaration in 20 minutes before your lawyer has to go to court? Hey fuck you consumer. Have a medical emergency and need to print something to save a patient? Fuck you consumer.
Someone should sue them for everything they are. Because they are thieves of the highest order.
But you agreed to it.
When does an agreement become null and void when the knowledge and time needed to understand the terms, and especially whether they even stand in the various jurisdictions, is simply unfeasible for a layperson to be expected to possess?
In a similar vein, if an agreement requires a lawyer on call/retainer to interpret, what court besides a bought court would possibly uphold such a standard?
Fwiw I’m not asking this with the expectation of you personally having the answers, but to further highlight the absurdity of many of these so-called agreements.
EULAs and TOSs have been tossed out in court before under the logic that you need to understand an agreement for it to be legally binding and that not reading the agreement inherently prevents you from understanding it.
In most of the World EULAs have no legal standing whatsoever because they’re an attempt by the seller to after the sale change the terms of the sale.
It’s mainly in the US that those things aren’t instantly dismissed by the court as legally meaningless, but then again the US is way less consumer friendly that, for example, pretty much all of Europe.
Can you provide case law? I’m interested.
Wikipedia has an overview and their enforceability varies pretty dramatically across the US (which is why many such agreements attempt to specify which states or courts they must be litigated against in).
Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine - The Verge
(or a laser printer in general, Brother is just a Known Brand)
That article was a surprisingly funny read. Thanks for sharing it.
HP can make good printers. It has the right hardware, capabilities and price (Of the printers, not the ink) to be a very good product. It’s just their obnoxiously asshole-design software that is designed to make you to keep paying for using a product you already own.
Kinda reminds me of Sony when it was managed by Engineers and Sony after the Engineers in CxO positions were replaced by MBAs back in the 90s after they Movie & Music side of the business gained the upper hand over the Consumer Electronics side.
Sure, they could still design good products and manufacture them with high quality standards … and chose instead to make DRM-locked pieces of crap (designed with as top objective protect the IP of the Movie & Music business from all those “evil” consumer who might want to, say, listen to their music in more than one device without buying it once per device) using inferior parts than before and likelly to be manufactured in the same factory in China working for the same Taiwanese Manufacturing Outsourced as all the other crap products.
Back in the 80s they were a byword for quality, nowadays they’re just another brand.
The driver support for Linux is just awful. I couldn’t get the Brother 7055W to work on Arch. It worked on Fedora though, but I don’t have that anymore.
I gave up also. The entire software experience is just shit and buggy as hell. Avoid.
I’ve had two Brother laser printers now, in both cases drivers were packaged as either .deb or .rpm.
I’m currently running a Brother HL-L2395DW mono multifunction laser printer under KDE Neon, and both the scanner and printer work perfectly over the network.
But I’m on Arch
Can confirm. Support brother for their ethics and quality.
Hahah, I opened the link and it’s the exact model I have.
What the fuck is wrong with people? It’s been common knowledge that hp is trash for decades now. The whole idea of capitalism is that the bad products fail when customers go to the competitors who do a better job, but hp is not a monopoly and there are better competitors that exist, but people keep in buying HP because frankly, they are too fucking stupid. Capitalism is a lie because consumers are too stupid to pick the best products.
The average person is not invested into printers and just needs a printer to occasionally print something. It’s not something they know a lot about and in the store they see a cheap printer from a well known brand that gave them good experiences with other products. It makes total sense for them to buy it. I’m sure they will know what products/brands to avoid in other areas that are unknown to you.
To add to yours, when the person who isn’t up on printers goes to a store like walmart that has 4 different HP models on the shelf ranging from $40 to $90, one cannon for $80, and one brother for $120, they will be much more apt to get the HP because they just don’t know.
The simplest proof that the Homo Economicus human model used in the mathematical models that justify Free Market Theory is complete total bollocks is that the Marketing that has no mention of the qualities of the product whatsoever, actually works (perfumes and cars are prime examples but there are tons of examples for consumer tech also).
That and some people from Behavioural Economics (the only part of that domain which is actually scientific) have shown with various experiments that there are lots of ways in which people are not rational in their economic decisions, hence not at all the “pure personal upside maximizer” which is the Homo Economicus model.
People sticking to a well-known name such as HP is probably down to the effect of familiarity (at times known as “name recognition”) - maybe one of the biggest irrationalities in human economic behaviour and one of the pathways most commonly exploited by marketing.
And for example, the products that sell the most on amazon are not the best products, they’re the ones that give amazon the biggest advertising budget.
My hp laptop works fine, but yeah hp printers are terrible. They are very slow to print, and the ink was quite expensive.
I don’t have any experience with their laptops, but they pissed me off so much with their printers that I’ve written off their entire brand. Even if their other stuff is really good, I’m fine with writing them off entirely just out of spite.
Honestly the laptops are pretty good in my opinion. My HP pavillion laptop had space to upgrade RAM, install new hard drives and plenty of ports. But I still agree with you that the printers are complete rubbish.
Most people just buy a printer, they’re not doing research on the subject. And if they’re not using computers day to day, or for work, they’re even less likely to know what shit hp is up to.
There was a time when Hewlet Packard products were the best, them it became HP and…
I was there, but that was decades ago.
At least three…¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you only print something once every couple of months I only need a cheap printer and dont care if the ink is a bit more expensice since I never use it. Though I admit my blood pressure always rises trying to get the thing to work
Ink jets burn ink even if you dont print anything, with their periodic “cleaning cycles”. That or their nozzles jam if you dont print often enough. They can make really high quality prints, but I’d never buy one again. Lasers can sit for months and they still pop out perfect prints every time.
I bought a brother laser printer and have had no issues with it, and I’m still using the original toner years and hundreds of pages later. They’re more expensive up front but they’re not that much more expensive. The entry level brother laser printer is only ~$100, and compared to HP, by the time you buy 2 ink cartridges you’ll have lost any savings you made on the printer itself. It is absolutely not cheaper to buy HP. If I’d have done that I’d have spent more on HP ink alone by now than the entire brother printer which I haven’t had to replace the toner for even though the one it’s sold with isn’t totally full.
Printer company are one of the biggest legalized scammer we currently have. Out water and some ink they make huge amount of Profit.
They are the Definition of making Gold out of shit.
I just read an article the other day that said LG is about to start charging subscription fees for washing machines 🙄
I will go old school and start washing my clothes against a rock in the river before I’ll pay a fucking subscription to use my own washing machine
That is crazy.
Like a damn laundromat. So is LG gonna supply water and power too? Wtf are the charging for? The right to buy their product? Lmao. Fuck off.
Go analog. Real analog. Sticks and stones baby.
The article said the subscription was for “software updates” which really seems like something they should provide for free anyway so you’re really just paying for the privilege to use their precious machine that you already paid for lol
Software updates for what? New ways to wash your clothes? I only use like two or three settings in mine
Knowing LG it’s probably updates to make it play Jingle Bells at Christmas time or something lol
Sounds like paywalling security updates.
Those pesky hackers turning off my washing machine when I’m trying to do laundry!
Well, if your washing machine was connected to the internet you would also need security updates. Of course the only reason you’d connect your washing machine to the internet would be in order to get said security updates in the first place.
Great job creating a need by developing the fix for it in the first place.
Potentially more serious than that. A poorly protected washing machine (or any other IOT device) can serve as an attack vector into your local network.
I think it’s for “smart” washing machines that you can control from your phone etc. So that’s likely what the “updates” would be related too…why you’d need to control your washing machine from afar is beyond me but some people love smart gadgets and will by anything that connects to their phone.
I hate the make everything a smart appliance trend… Grills, washers and dryers, dishwashers, coffee machines… WHY? No one needs this shit.
There are cases for it, eg programming a wash to occur when energy demand is low.
In my opinion we should be pursuing technologies to do this that don’t require an internet connection. Even being able to program a schedule into the machine and it can detect if something is in there or not. That would be enough since energy usage follows a relatively consistent plot. These companies don’t give a shit about anything other than coming up with ways to make more money.
The cost of the laundry subscription is likely to vastly out cost the energy savings it may provide.
Fucking software updates for a washing machine? If my washing machine needs a software update, that should be a fucking recall. A washing machine should be a fully embedded system imo.
It’s updates for the cybersecurity that exists strictly only because it is connected to the internet which in turn is something that exists strictly only because there’s software updates.
Megaman Battle Network was prophetic. Terrorist will flood your house using a phone.
Why would anyone connect a washing machine to the internet??? To play Skyrim?
I hope this is rage bait because I can’t think of any reason a washing machine would ever need a software update. Is it like a smart machine? If so then just let me disable it
what is the difference between a subscription and a never ending loan
A loan usually comes with full support and warranty service for the duration of the loan. With a subscription I bet you get to pay without receiving these benefits in return.
Well any manufacturer warranty would apply to the machine regardless of how you pay for it
With a loan you actually receive money at the start.
Yeah. I think I’d rather employ someone to wash my clothes for me than pay a subscription
Their laptops and desktops are terribly cheap too. Just avoid HP all together is everyone’s best bet.
I can speak for their terrible cheapness, I work at a repair shop and we got a lot of HP laptops. It’s extremely common for the very stiff hinge just to snap the upper case because they didn’t even try to reinforce it. Just 3 screws to hold down this half an inch long hinge and that’s it, you can see it flexing and twisting when using it.
I swear all those HPs and frankly a lot of dells have the build of wet newspaper, I wouldn’t touch them (minus HP elite books, my 8770w is great).
On another note Lenovos and Thinkpads are always very sturdy and are very good.
Snagged an 840 G6 for a little more than 100 and it’s working fine. Had the company send me a new touchpad and there hasn’t been an issue since
Third voice for a Brother. I used to work an office supply store and they were by far the most reliable printers we sold.
I’ve had my Brother printer for several years and never had an issue. I don’t have the color one, just black and white. Would buy again.
That was because of a misunderstanding. Brother started a subscription service and people assumed that meant you had to pay a monthly fee to use the printers like with HP. Instead, it’s a toner subscription like Dollar Shave Club or Amazon’s Subscribe and Save where they auto-send a new toner at your requested interval.
I use cheap Chinese knockoff toner in my Brother laser
I heard they stopped allowing that recently.
Mine still allows it. There might be a model or two that doesn’t but I’d be surprised.
Up to date firmware?
I treat that thing like a rented uhaul, of course the firmware hasn’t been updated
Saw some people posting recently they sold out also
I also heard a rumor about something somewhere, that maybe something might have happened. But I’m not sure. /S
I just installed a Brother printer for my dad, absolutely zero bullshit.
Yes, some of their firmware updates started breaking aftermarket toner cartridges and support said “that sucks” like it was very intentional. It seems constrained to a few of the MFC color models more than anything tho I’ve never had any issues other than bad wifi modules in the b&w home office lasers. Which if you’re using wifi on a printer that’s your own damn fault lol
Yeah I’m not sure whether this is shenanigans or an actual problem Brother is managing here. The post does mention there are problems with incorrect response to temperature management with the unoriginal cartridge, which again could theoretically cause harm.
I honestly wasn’t aware unoriginal cartridges were a thing for Brother printers, since the originals tend to be quite reasonable.
But to continue using the unoriginal cartridges he can as the answer states, use BRAdmin to downgrade the firmware.
So it’s not like Brother is attempting to take control of your printer like HP likes to do.
I’m sure HP didn’t ramp up their bullshit from 0 to 11 overnight, the question now is how much we can trust Brother not to be walking the same path and mandating more and more restrictive firmwares in the future. I think them opensourcing drivers and firmwares would help mitigate that, and if their business model is really to be that sole good guy and antagonize the likes of HP/Epson/… they don’t have anything to lose and a lot to win (or as a minimum, myself as a customer).
HP has done the ink cartridge shenanigans for more than 30 years now. They just recently found a new trick. Apart from that nothing has really changed.
I am not aware Brother ever did similar things to basically trick or cheat their customers. Most other vendors are somewhere in between. AFAIK none are as bad as HP.
My dad is running his Brother HL-1212W printer on the open source Linux driver, works perfectly fine, and I was actually surprised about the high quality of his prints for such a cheap printer.
AFAIK Brother is among the best regarding opensource drivers too.
All this printer talk almost makes me want to buy a new printer. My current printer is a 14 year old Samsung color laser, and the print quality is not that stellar anymore. ;) The Samsung open source driver kind of suck for this printer. There isn’t even a driver for this specific model CLP-325W, so I have to choose another Samsung printer that is (mostly) compatible.
The Brother printer was completely plug and play. The system recognized the printer, and installed the correct open source driver, no hassle at all.
I’ve had the same brother inkjet printer for 14 years now, and it still works great.
A shame to hear how far HP has fallen. Back in the day they had some solid, workhorse laser printers that delivered for years with no issues and pretty good toner efficiency. Based on what I’ve read here, I’m not likely to buy another.
HP peaked with the LaserJet IIIsi. It’s all been downhill ever since.
Brother.
Love my brother laser printer. I’ve had it for years, print infrequently, haven’t had to change toner once, and it works everytime I ask it to print on the first time
I liked their reverse polish programmable calculators once.
Turns out that didn’t make the stock price go up fast enough to enable buy-backs for the execs.
“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”
I guess this sentence is already became the reality in some countries if you can’t even buy a god damn printer without it locking you out.
Terminal capitalism looks a lot like communism.
My mom’s Amazon Halo that counts steps just shut off because they ended the service. I do not trust anything that requires live service at this point.
nobody should support companies that place restrictions on their hardware for RANSOM
