this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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The Verge published this spam article about the "best printers of 2024" to demonstrate how terrible Google's search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search "best printer" on Google.

I love a good, informative troll.

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[–] CosmicCleric 77 points 7 months ago (4 children)

From the article...

Don’t feel compelled to do it; my only ask is that you make this article go viral by sharing it in faux-outrage that the EIC of The Verge has published an article partially generated by AI, because after the buttons I am going to include a bunch of AI-generated copy from Google’s Gemini in order to pad this thing out.

I have to admit, it was an interesting read, not quite like anything I've ever read before, for a review.

I honestly can't tell if this is just some genius way of sliding in some AI generated content into a review and getting it to pass our review, or just an editor-in-chief really frustrated with Google's search algorithm paying attention to manipulation by others, so trying to really get their stuff out there for us to see.

Either way, it's definitely worth the read.

As far as Brother printers go, I own an all-in-one laser that's over a decade old, and it's still going strong. And it actually works with Linux to boot. I do hate though that they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early, but if you mask sensors and such, then an existing toner will work forever.

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

[–] [email protected] 46 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There are very few printers that don't work with Linux. Linux has drivers to interface with most of them through whatever means you like, right in the kernel.

That's one of the reasons my android phone (Linux kernel, remember) is better at finding and queuing up prints on a network printer than any windows machine I've ever used.

I just hit share on a document, choose print... And then it just works.

[–] abhibeckert 18 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

they do some squirrely stuff to try to get you to buy a new toner cartridge early

My Brother is newer than yours (the cheapest one I could get that prints on both sides of the paper), and has a setting to toggle how it behaves when toner is low.

The default is to pause printing until you replace the toner - honestly that's not entirely wrong. Having the printer run out of toner half way through an important print job could be a disaster.

The alternative mode is to just show a "low toner" warning badge whenever you print a document. That's what I use, but I also check if it printed properly before closing the document which a lot of people don't do. It looks like this:

As far as I know it's just a simple counter - how many pages have you printed since it was replaced. Obviously that's never going to be particularly accurate.

[–] CosmicCleric 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Having the printer run out of toner half way through an important print job could be a disaster.

What, like the printer would explode or something similar kind of disaster?

Or the kind of where the printout doesn't come out well, and you put a new cartridge in, and then you reprint and it looks fine, type of disaster?

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The guy who wrote it is the editor-in-chief.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

One of my housemates has a brother printer and I was testing some stuff out on LMDE and noticed it was available to print to. No searching for it or driver to be installed or anything. I don't actually need to print but that's pretty cool.

[–] CosmicCleric 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

One of my housemates has a brother printer and I was testing some stuff out on LMDE and noticed it was available to print to. No searching for it or driver to be installed or anything. I don’t actually need to print but that’s pretty cool.

People keep missing that I'm talking about a all-in-one, and not just a simple printer-only.

I never had a problem with the printing part of the all-in-one printer, but the scanning and faxing stuff required the Brother driver support, and that wad not natively supported, or were supposed to be supported but it didn't work well, or at all. There were issues with 32-bit versus 62-bit libraries, etc.

Took years to get to a point where the brother drivers would just install and everything would work right. And not everything ever worked right from native Linux.

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

The comment I replied to didn't mention you had any issues. I just wanted to mention something I had noticed that I thought was cool. Not trying to get into a debate about it.