Do printers work on Linux?

Printing changed quietly over the last ten years or so. Printers stopped needing a program written for each model and started advertising what they can do over the network, in a language every operating system understands. The three labels for this are AirPrint (Apple's), Mopria (used by Android and Windows) and IPP Everywhere (the open one from the Printer Working Group). A printer carrying any of those badges is a driverless printer, and OpenPrinting, the group that maintains Linux printing, says most modern printers work out of the box because of it.

In practice that means you open the print dialogue, your printer is already in the list, and you print. This has been the ordinary way of things on Linux for several years, over the network and over a USB cable alike. Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora and the rest all share the same printing machinery, so the experience is much the same across the popular beginner distributions.

The awkward cases are older printers and the cheapest all-in-ones. A printer from before roughly 2012 predates the standards and needs an old-style driver, which OpenPrinting still catalogues in its Foomatic database with a rating of perfect, mostly or unsupported. Some budget all-in-ones also print perfectly while refusing to scan, because printing and scanning are two separate systems on Linux. Read the scanners page before you assume the whole machine is covered.

Brand reputation is real but it is less important than the badge on the box. A driverless Canon behaves like a driverless Brother. Where brand matters is what happens when driverless is not available, and there the vendors differ a lot in how much they have published for Linux.