Need to buy a modern printer, some of the cheapest models (for personal use).
I have heard many bad things about modern printers:
Is there a brand of printers that is the least bad in light of the points i describe above? I need it to work on Ubuntu atleast.
Or maybe another way to put it - are there brands i should avoid?
A Brother black & white laser printer.
thanks for the question, I’m also interested.
Maybe we can add another point: that invisible yellow tracking dot printers put on every paper?
“Modern” printers work in Linux without drivers/software installed in the system. In the past HP printers were probably the best for Linux as you could just install the hplip package which also provided support for their scanners. Today, it’s not needed. Here’s an article about driverless printing in Debian: CUPSDriverlessPrinting - Debian Wiki . In short, a network printer should be automatically detected and visible in the printing dialog. I think it may also work if a printer is connected directly to your computer.
I have a Brother laser printer with a scanner. I use it as a network printer and in the past it worked without issues (including the scanner) as long as my firewall was switched off - otherwise the messages broadcasted by the printer would not be received in my system and the printer would not be detected (I was not able to completely fix it). In the past months something broke and my printer is no longer detected in my Linux even if I disable the firewall.
I can also use the printer from Android without any additional software if the printer is connected to the same network - but it requires to temporarily disable the “Block connections without VPN” switch.
If you want to prevent the printer from accessing the internet you need to configure it in your router’s firewall.
Question what if someone wants to print color (with the option of black and white but duh on that), what would you recommend in that case
I have pretty good experience with Brother and Epson.
I can only advise against HP since some Printer utils (especially for updating, fixing bugs or maintenance) are only accessible through the HP Support application which only runs on Windows.
didnt epson succumb to OEM ink only lately or is it just me?
Maybe it was brother?
I have one Epson. Use Brother in my school/university/work and about one year back in time owned an HP.
I have not seen problems with such things. But this might have changed.
I would just go to your local print store and ask them to print it for you.
Depending on how often you need that, might be more affordable and better quality/with less maintenance.
If you want to print high-res photos it’s meanwhile a different topic and I guess you’ll need to cash in regularly for the paper. 
Besides this, I recommend some USB stick printing and nothing too crazy over WiFi/app or alike.
it does not even need to be an image and at my work we have 2 printers that with liquid ink they print colors, with one of them also capable of pritiing A2 and below or A1 paper
They will have a copy of this along with many third parties.
That’s what I was thinking. This is a bad idea.
Idk, depends on the kind of place. A small photo store is different from a “print service” store IMO. But yeah, it’s maybe not optimal indeed.
This is the best recommendation hands down.
The only issue I had is that I couldnt get the Linux drivers to work with Raspberry pi OS. I think its because of the lack of ARM drivers as most printers only have x86-64 drivers. But I must be doing something wrong because Raspberry Pis are used as print servers.
If its black and white laser printer, it wont get that invisible yellow mark. 
Can anyone confirm if these yellow marks are US only? I don’t know if these still happen today. Are there are equivalent marks for black and white prints?
I currently have to use print services about once every two weeks, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d rather have the maintenance and the expense than print any more at any of those places. They keep a copy and a source file, and the staff there have too much time on their hands. I also think people tend to print important stuff, which frequently contains a lot of personal information, rather than something trivial where it wouldn’t matter what you used.
There’s really not much difference between a photo store in your local mall and a dedicated printing service in that regard.
Btw, not sure if it might fit the use case but have people consider thermal 
printers?
Cheap, reliable and cost effective. With the benefit of potentially fading away with time, perfect for sensitive documents where you could enjoy some “natural way” of removing your personal data by it just disappearing. Probably not fitting for every use case but might be fine for others.
Very much used by small companies selling products on Etsy from what I saw.
No experience with it myself tho.
My question stands
What if the user wants color printing and no I don’t necessarily mean photo printing, just color (CMYB)
Sony makes the thermal papers I use for work. There are windows drivers of course but there should also be linux drivers because I’ve seen them used on linux machines as well.
I’d probably still go with Brother. The problem is that printers still call home and you have to set gateway on the printer to 0.0.0.0 so that you can connect to it but it wont reach out (IIRC I could be wrong).
a stricter way to enforce this is a firewall rule on your router, eg. for OpenWrt add the following to /etc/config/firewall:
config rule
option src 'lan'
option dest 'wan'
option name 'Printer-Drop-WAN'
list src_ip '192.168.1.42' #adjust this and also assign your printer a static dhcp lease in /etc/config/dhcp
option target 'DROP'
the printer could still bypass this by changing its IP or MAC
Changing it’s soft or hard MAC? Is that even a thing?
Damn, no way to have a clear known on where the device is on the LAN then? 