• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Maybe “bad” is the wrong term. But every printer - Brother included - has its own little set of firmware to maintain and special connection protocols to support. The interface between OS and printers, generally speaking, sucks. Wifi connections are unreliable. Its very easy to get into contention with multiple devices. And that’s for a simple little household printer.

    Talk to my IT staff about how much of a pain in the ass commercial printers are. More machines, each machine has to connect to multiple printers, and the software to handle these cases generally sucks. Brother’s are the least-bad, but they’re still annoying to configure and periodically unreliable to access.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      The industry has made us accept a lot of sub-par configurations, and we need to stop this.

      1. no more wifi. If you like it, put a cable on it. ACLs get simpler and spooky radio issues become a distant, comical memory.

      2. Whether it’s PDF or something better, find the body pushing for a common format and give them eyeballs and money. Make printers interchangeable again.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        no more wifi. If you like it, put a cable on it.

        Hard to run a cable to my laptop a lot of the time. Impossible to do it from a cell phone, and I do periodically like to print a PDF or other small file I’ve got on there. But I agree, wifi complicates things. It certainly shouldn’t be the default option.

        Make printers interchangeable again.

        A good decision at a technical level, but we all know why monopoly-pursuing private businesses don’t want to go in that direction.