Kyocera

I can recommend Kyocera - my current one has been going strong for 15 years now. I had problems with paper transport about two years ago - but that's expected after that many prints, and was solved with a reasonably priced field maintenance kit. As far as I know they're still not doing any nonsense to force you to use their toner - but even if they did I probably wouldn't care as the original toner is cheap enough that I just can't be arsed to figure out good compatible ones.

That may well be the case except for my Kyocera printer. I never managed to get the device to stay online for more than 5 minutes on Windows 10. Wanting to print a letter was actually a hassle taking ~15 minutes. When I plugged it into my Nobara(Fedora) PC it just worked - I didn't even have to specify a driver or anything. It can now even print barcodes. It couldn't with Windows 10, no matter what driver I tried. Also: KB505518 from April 2025 disabled all my USB ports - there was never a fix.

We received a two knife set as a wedding gift many years ago. This was well before they were common, and it was quite a nice gift. I strongly agree with the "don't buy a knife you can't sharpen" point that folks often make, but ceramic knives do have their niche. They're great for minimizing oxidation along cuts. E.g. cutting iceberg lettuce and avoiding having the edges turn brown. They're also very lightweight, which is nice for some things, while being bad for others. I'd never use them the way I do my workhorse chef's knife, but there are certainly tasks I prefer them for. Dicing lots of hot peppers comes to mind, oddly enough, as does some very precise and relatively tedious knifework like making very even matchstick cuts for carrots/radishes/etc (the large one has a very wide blade, which is great for this, and is lightweight enough to reduce fatigue). Overall, I can see why folks like them. It's not really the "no need to sharpen" point. It's more the "lightweight and very thin" part, along with a non-oxidizing edge. I'm still kind of opposed on principle, I suppose, but I do use the set we were gifted fairly often, despite having some very nice steel cutlery that I'm very fond of. I can't blame anyone for buying them now that they're priced more reasonably than they used to be.

in my experience: 1. linuxmint for PCs / laptops => either the cinnamon or mate edition <== for older hardware!! and yes: semi-cheap brother or kyocera laserprinter - they also work like a charme with linux-based desktops ... but avoid the cheapest ones which sometimes need the windows-software for printing :) 2. either android phones or simple feature-phones with big buttons targeted at sight-impared / elderly people. if you buy them new, avoid the ones which do not support LTE/4G ... depending on which country you are in: here in central/west europe they start to switch off UMTS/3G soon, so the old ones will fall back to GSM/2G. if they don't need a computer: 3. android tablet for media consumption ... with at least a 10 inches screen, because of sight imparement! nearly forgot that ... :) just my 0.02€

You get what you pay for. Any of the "rugged" phones like my Kyocera should last a lifetime. I used this website to find it https://josebriones.org/dumbphone-finder

> Its official print driver isn't just a PPD but has some binary blob Linux executable configured as a filter. I'm surprised people say no driver is required, auto-recognized out of the box etc. In contrast, I agree with the parent post that Brother requires a very non-standard binary installation that will throw various errors on a clean Intel 64 bit Ubuntu 21.04 LTS installation. I tried this 4 times with 2 printers, 3 times it did not work and 1 time it worked. Never got WiFi to work on a Brother laser, so had to go by USB, which is annoying. Edit: Still better than my $450 HP duplex business printer, which stands unused due to forced subscriptions and rejected cardridges. So far, the best experiences I had with a Kyocera b/w laser and Lexware b/w laser (the latter in the office, so I did not install it). Brother is okay, but with random driver fiddling required.

Half my family now owns the small desktop sized sub-£200 Kyocera laser printers. It was honestly revolutionary the first few times I was able to connect to their WiFi, hit add printer on my phone or laptop, press print, and it just worked with no drivers or network troubleshooting or anything. They completely blow any consumer inkjet out of the water in ease of use, not having to install bloatware with popups telling you to buy more ink and preventing you from printing black and white when the magenta ink is "only" at 25%, printing speed, and the fact they don't outright break forever if you go 6 months without printing (where an Inkjet would often get irreparably clogged and be ruined).

I used to have a Brother laser but now have a Kyocera color laser MFP, it works beautifully so that’s another good option. Also a networked printer is a lot less faff if you have a lot of Linux machines at home, from a drivers perspective.

I love Kyocera's dumb phones. The only thing I miss is having a decent camera in my pocket. Every other aspect of smartphones are a disease. I don't miss it at all.