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Unfortunately there is close to zero trustworthy hardware manufacturer these days. In the DIY world there’s still Virax or Festool who have a well-deserved good reputation. In the laptop/phone space there’s some manufacturers making efforts like System76/Librem and a few others, but they still have no power over all the components so obsolescence (planed or not) still applies.
But in the 2D printer world it’s just… mafia everywhere. Apparently print heads are remarkable high-tech that are designed around specific ink mechanical properties to handle, and there’s very few people/corporations with the know-how and the budget to produce these. That’s why you find an abundance of free-hardware 3D printers (a heating head is easy to manufacture) but exactly zero free-hardware 2D printer.
I personally would spend more money than i should on a free-hardware 2D printer. Printers are usually the worst pieces of hardware i have to interact with.
One day, back in 2010, I got pissed at my Epson color printer and I saw an ad in Fry’s for a Samsung office all I’m one printer/scanner/fax. It’s 2022 and I’m looking right at it right now. It has moved to 6 different houses and it’s in need for new toner, but it still runs pretty well.
Epson just screwed up it’s printer business model because I would never, under any circumstances buy another Epson anything, ever again. I’ll buy it used from a garage sale as a paper weight before I’d ever buy epsom for anything. I got down to the code on this kind of shit with my Epson and my Brother printers. I was able to get the brother running again, but the Epson went into the garbage.
Do this is what they did to their clients. Client no more.
I’m surprised there isnt an OpenWRT type OS for printers yet.
At least printers are barely needed anymore
I thibk mainly because printers are WAY more non-standardized in how they work than routers. An alternative OS would need to account for the minutiae differences of all the mechanical bits.
