Problems

I bought the Brother HL3142CW printer because it looked nice, cheap and hat a good rating. However I had at least four issues with this printer using it for linux:

• Needed to download a special driver from the Brother support page (and that had a release date of 2014)
• Suddenly two printers appeared
• Printer settings seemd to be mostly non functional
• Colors were off. Red was orange and cyan looked really blue

Now a color printer that doesn't really print colors is a little bit stupid. Turns out the solution was really easy.

Solution

The printer supports the internet printer protocol ipp. That means that in principle a special driver should not be necessary. First you have to find the printer, which is really easy:

ippfind --ls

Then add a printer via the printer settings page. When asked for a printer select: "Brother HL-3142CW series, driverless, cups-filters 1.20.2" This will solve the problem with the wrong colors, without downloading a special driver, only one printer is visible and this one will not have any options.