Nice to hear! I'm not really doing Linux on the desktop, but in this age of almost-but-not-quite paper free, I like to think of printers in decades. And on that time scale, "no special fiery hoops to jump through on Linux" is really the only thing that has any value as a predictor of future usefulness. After some googling my vague conclusion was that a full complement of wireless protocols would indeed be a tolerable substitute of PCL6, but I'm glad for the confirmation. (even if I recently dropped out of the printer market again, turns out that the day I gave up on my ca 2001 Samsung I just wasn't sufficiently desperate to tease it into accepting an empty page as something to print on)
"paper free" sounds un-fun. I have a brother laser, that replaced a 2 decade old HP laser that my youngest broke when he was 2 or 3. We go through about 3 reams a year, more when one of us is going for a degree. I print maybe 5 things a month on average, usually recipes. I wouldn't forego a printer for any reason.
you can use gimp to take images and make them into coloring book pages, you can print instructions, calendars, drawings, diagrams; prompts for writing, your own writing to make sure that the "screen" isn't tricking your brain making you miss editing/grammar errors. Coloring pages, maps of countries, and other educational things are more fun if you can hold them and put them on your wall, if my kids are any indication. Having a scanner and a copier and a networked printer in a single box for what they cost - that makes it difficult to see the aversion.
I have had fancy e-readers since the original kindle, and before that a Clie and two palm pilots with acrobat and an epub (or whatever) reader. and i still prefer dead wood. I read more books on paper than e-ink. I read more on a computer screen than books, though.
