Despite HP providing a lot of excellent documentation on the status of its
printers dependence on non-free software most of the printers readily
available in retail stores currently are either dependent on non-free
software or not compatible with Trisquel “out of the box”.
That complicates the situation quite a bit. Its not that easy to pick out the
right printers as a result. You have to do a bit of digging through HP's
documentation and then understand the not terribly well worded (from a free
software stand point) documentation and what it means. Then you have to
compare it against the HPLIP versions in Trisquel to see what should in
theory work “out of the box”.
It can be more complicated than it seems at first too. Despite the appearance
of what you see simply by visiting HP.com and personal experiences the
company actually has over 2,000 different printer variations for laser
printers alone. Factor in inkjet and all-in-one machines and now it's near
impossible for the average consumer to figure out. Model numbers and product
names get very confusing very fast as much of the documentation is too broad
to be perfectly useful (an example 17 different core products contain a model
number with “4500” in it, of which they are not all free software
friendly, and there are dozens of variations for each more specific number
too, not all of which may be available in a given market, but frequently are
with slight variations in features and compatibility).
I've definitely been a big advocate for updating the HPLIP component and
looked into what Rubén's done with the HPLIP packages. They have been
modified to be free software friendly and as such I'd advise against using
the Ubuntu repository or downloading from HP directly. We would like to fund
an update to this package specifically although it hasn't quite happened yet
(and not because we didn't commit money for funding it).
In any event if you haven't got a printer already I'd encourage you to get
one from us (ie, ThinkPenguin, CEO of ThinkPenguin here, visit via
libre.thinkpenguin.com, 25% of profit goes to help fund Trisquel
development). We've stocked them for years and have models compatible “out
of the box” with Trisquel 6. I've been working to add to our current line
up too so there is quite a selection these days (although not all the most
recent ones have support for Trisquel 6 “out of the box” yet).
If your outside the United States we're always happy to make some suggestions
(not cost effective to ship printers outside North America and there is no
printer stock in our UK warehouse), but it's a lot more difficult to advise
with certainty as I've explained above.
In any event if you do stumble upon the right HP printer I think we concluded
there was no non-free software included in the HP/Ubuntu download itself and
as long as the printer does not need it then it won't download anything
non-free. It's however in the code as such that the utility will download
that non-free code for you if its a printer which depends on it.
