Will Linux Support My Printer If I Make The Switch From Windows Or Mac?

There are a lot of people out there switching from Windows or Mac directly to Linux. This is probably because it’s rarely used by most people and it’s open source, plus there are much less threats out there available for this OS. A man named Linus Torvalds created Linux in 1991 just as a hobby project, and since then more and more people have been trying different distros for Linux, and two of the most popular versions of Linux are Ubuntu and Debian, either of the two might support your printer.

If you are running one of those two operating systems and you plug in a printer that is also turned on, the driver may download automatically. Worst comes to worst you may have to find the driver yourself and install it manually. This is commonly the case for printers and other devices that ran on Windows XP back in the early 2000’s, you had to manually search for the drivers on Google, sometimes you thought you had the right driver but sometimes we were wrong and installed something different. These days, Windows 11 or Mac OS X will download any driver automatically because these OS’s are much more popular.

So anyways, all I have to say now is, plug in your printer to your Linux machine (while your printer is obviously turned on, and your computer running Linux must have an active internet connection). After that you might notice a message pop up, if one does you know it’s doing something. Maybe after this, restart your computer and then try to print a document when your booted back into your computer. If you don’t have a word processor yet, go to your App Store built into Linux and search for Libre Office, it’s free and is compatible with Microsoft Word documents. I actually bought a Canon imageCLASS MF3010 Multifunction Monochrome L and it was sort of recognized by Ubuntu, but I tried to print something using the Libre suite but it didn’t work, so I gave up.

I wasn’t honestly trying to switch to Ubuntu or Linux, I was just testing the OS on an older machine of mine. So anyways, above is an image showing what showed up when I connected my printer into an Ubuntu system. It was recognized as something else than a Canon imageCLASS MF3010 Multifunction Monochrome L which was my actual printer. Maybe this driver it installed was compatible with my printer?, but nothing worked anyways. According to this forum post however, there is a driver available for this printer which a link is provided in that link. This just proves that if you do some digging, you can indeed get things to work in Ubuntu or Linux itself.

So, if you need help with your printer and getting it to work on Linux, leave a comment down below and I will help the best I can.