Unrelated to the "Linux-friendly, non-abusive" matter (which other members here will no doubt deal with), my immediate thought is, it CANNOT be an inkjet device. With your infrequent printing schedule, such a device would give you endless troubles and expenses with dried-out, often unresurrectable, inkjet cartridges or nozzles. If colour is not needed, then it should be a laser device. Those are fine with infrequent printing, though with such low print volumes, you'd still have the issue that even toner does deteriorate after a few years of sitting in a cartridge.
Back to inkjet devices: You could print a handful of useless "maintenance" pages every 5 days or so to keep the cartridges and nozzles in good condition, which would result in way more "maintenance" pages than real pages being printed over time, with a much higher cost per real page than normal.
The dot-matrix printers of the distant past didn't have the above issues. :) :)
Hartmut W Sager - Tel +1-204-339-8331
On Sat, 31 Oct 2020 at 18:00, Glen Ditchfield GJDitchfield@acm.org wrote:
I'm looking for a color printer/scanner/copier, suitable for printing a few pages every few weeks. My current device is connected by USB to a Mac that serves as a CUPS host and runs the scanner software, and that's just fine. I look at most of the modern features being offered and rate them somewhere between "meh" and "get off my lawn" (Alexa voice-enabled printing? Seriously?) but might be willing to grant access to the local Wi-Fi.
Do you have any opinions on Linux-friendly, non-abusive devices?
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