I bought a laser printer by Brother a couple years ago and never had any problems with 'fake' toners, and it also runs perfectly using CUPS on Linux.

I suppose people don't research refill options ahead of buying a printer? This ongoing maintenance cost would be the first thing I'd look into.

My initial question wasn't meant to be a rhetorical one. I was genuinely curious if there is any upside/reason why one should buy HP (print quality or whatever.)

Read the thread. Newer brother printers are also getting tricker with non-oem toners.

Well, thats depressing to hear.

I think HP are worst. Then Epson. Then Canon. Then Brother.

If you are willing to go to the professional/office grade, I can recommend the Canon imageClass line (caveat: only the models with native Postscript support) for use in Linux or wherever you might not want binary blob drivers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29869389

Avoiding their blobs may deny you of advanced features, but for documents where you're not aiming for max photo quality or color matching, it works very well.

I recently bought a Brother HL-4040CN off craigslist. Could not be happier.

It's 13 years old, but still runs like a champ. The network features are dead simple, like you'd expect. For $100, I think even the lifetime of the toner cartridges it came with is likely to be worth the cost.

I fully expect this printer to outlive my need to print things out.