So my mother recently bought an ET-2800, By HP we had an HP printer before and we got a new one because the old one would not work with my sister's Windows 11 Laptop. So I had to set it up for my mother, the manual said you can use it without the app. But there was no way to physically do that. Anyway, I downloaded the app on my phone (android) and the app would not connect to the printer. So I used my mother's iPhone and it would connect. The setup process was stupid proof. And after I got it all full of ink, it was very painless. However, this is where the H in HP should stand for HELL. Because a few months go by and my sister and my mother need some papers printed. No problem. I thought to myself, so my sister tried to print it wirelessly. Couldn't find the printer, I said ok maybe it's a dumb driver, USB didn't work either. I asked my sister to send it to me, so I can print it on my w540 running rocky 9. Rocky picked up that I needed drivers and installed them. Wireless didn't work but wired showed up, I thought sweet I can just print the paper and get back to what I was doing. However, when I clicked print, the printer would grab the paper and run it though but not put ink on the paper. My mother asks me to forward the email to her to try to print it on her phone. I send it, and it prints, and the paper come out how it should with ink and the paper is finally printed.
After this experience with this printer, it makes me rather aggravated at this purchase, and no longer want to buy from HP. I have looked at Brother printers and there are no Proprietary ink cartage, and or laser printers. I purely wanted to talk about my experience with HP printers and would like to know what others have for a printer for recommendations, for when eventually HP kills support and makes it a paper weight, I've read many negative experiences with HP printer, specially from Lois Ross man and their anti consumer products.
They went to shit when they switched to a massive, bloated shitty software and driver package instead of just drivers. Wish I could remember what year that was, but it was like a 500MB download. I think remember I saw the package was over 1GB at one point. To run a f’n printer. And of course it was shitty. Connection problems, wouldn’t print when you sent the job, shitloads of useless tools that constantly wanted you to buy or subscribe to printer ink sales, etc. They made the driver harder and harder to find and pushed their bloatware.
Now you can find just the driver, 81MB or so, but they’re fucking with you over printer ink by trying to prevent you from refilling with 3rd party ink, using 3rd party cartridges, making it so you can’t print just black if you’re out of other colors, etc.
Even 81MB sounds obscene for what it is.
Printer technology is crazy old and basically no one is updating the actual low level protocols.
Often, the updated driver is just a translation layer for talking to the old one, and the stacking has been going on for decades.
It's why so many printer makers wanted to make the jump to wireless. The wireless printer protocol didn't need to be backwards compatible with wired, so they could just do what was easy.
They're still to cheap to do it right, so now it's wireless garbage, but it's less complicated garbage at least.
You can download their Universal Print Driver instead of using the software packages. It's one single driver that works with all of their printers, and even works for other brands printers.