I agree with nearly everything I’m seeing. Maybe to summarize:
Laser of any kind is shelf stable. Liquid ink dries out and different printers compensate for this in different ways. Even dumb ink tank printers - where you add liquid and there’s no chip to be read anywhere - can have internal ink sponges that fill up and cause failures. Just a different kind of chipped consumable.
Color laser means four smaller cartridges and an extra wear part to replace after a few years: ITB or intermediate transfer belt. Instead of going from toner drum to paper, toner goes onto this belt first and then to the paper.
Different printer manufacturers have different behaviors to lock you into only buying their consumables. HP tends to be the worst offender, but it varies.
I got lucky, bought a used HP Color Laserjet Pro MFP M477fdw. Basically two generations old, and the top of their desktop / tabletop printer line without being tabloid / large-format or being a huge copy machine / document station.
Toner chip validation is an option you can turn off. For now. But individual components have firmware versions and can be incompatible with each other, so I’m fully confident I’m one part replacement away from needing to update firmware on everything else and losing this tolerant behavior. A full refill of all four cartridges (5000 pages) totals like $65 right now, so that will suck.
I grew up poor, and reached adulthood at the tail end of the BBS days / start of the internet revolution. It was frustrating seeing so much history go by and not being able to take part in it.
Started playing with Linux early because, I think, I resented my parents never signing the permission form to let me get a school UNIX account. They thought I’d rack up thousands in long distance charges somehow. But I got Slackware 3.1 later as an adult.
I guess I wanted a taste of that “whee I’m a sysop too!” experience because in 2000 I stood up a personal domain and started making shell accounts for people on IRC. Part of my username dot net, though there’s nothing really there now. I was a bad sysadmin, though generous with my time and resources. Eventually it started feeling like a crushing weight of unresolved commitments, as the server needed more and more work that I didn’t know how to do.
The site eventually died in 2015 I think, ancient IDE hard drive finally clicked itself to death. Even more depressing. And then in the process of trying to recover the drive with Spinrite I straight up lost the drive. I think I didn’t label it well and it disappeared into a box with other IDE drives.
I found the drive again recently. I’ve been a professional C# developer since 2012 and since 2016 I’ve been with an awesome company and gotten to see a bunch of the ops side. That’s inspired me to try to get back into it, but with modern standards and security. And three ESXi servers.
Just last night I mostly finished loading my old passwd, shadow, and groups info into openldap. Got 400+ users, though I’m sure most were just ftp users who grabbed some fansub anime and split. Had 98 distinct file owners in /home/httpd/html, mostly web comics or personal file dumps. 15-ish phpbb boards. I’d love to get that all back online.
I know that won’t bring the 2000s back. Several of my users have probably passed away. Nobody will care about most of this. But it’ll feel like I’m closing out an older chapter of my life in a better way, if I get everything back online.
(And if I need to job hunt again, I can point to the site and say “behold my awesome devops skills! I can accomplish in months what a competent person can do in days!”)