Not too long ago I treated myself to a HP 3050 multi-function laser printer with fax, scanner, and copier. I almost went with Samsung because it makes good machines, and all of its monochrome printers have Linux drivers. But they are closed, proprietary binary drivers which are bad enough on their own: big fat pains to install and upgrade. And then the news broke about the ingenious security holes and inexplicable permissions changes on key directories introduced by the amusingly awful installer for the Samsung drivers, and that was all she wrote. HP, on the other hand, supports good-quality, well-supported genuine FOSS drivers, HPLIP, which we introduced ourselves to last week.

A number of Samsung printers are supported by CUPS, but a lot of them aren't, and I want to send my hard-earned money to vendors who are serious about supporting Linux users. A common problem with multi-function printers is that some parts work in Linux, and some parts don't. Or you have to pull all the pieces together yourself, instead of having a nice unified management console like hp-toolbox. Game, set, and match to HP.

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