The asbo motto: If it can't be done in Linux then don't do it!
Out of curiosity, what is your specialist printer? No doubt someone, somewhere is hacking away at a Linux driver for it!
It gives great satisfaction to liberate equipment that was enslaved to the Microsoft platform.
I don't really understand the manufacturers who insist on keeping their devices for Windows only. I guess they are being blackmailed or bullied in some way by the Great Satan of Redmond. A popular maker of digital storage oscilloscopes wouldn't release the USB transaction protocol for their scopes. They include a CD with all their new oscilloscopes but it contains very poor closed-source Windows software. We had just bought several of their budget models, in ignorance of the lack of a Linux driver. The scopes were bargain price: sub-£200 for dual trace 25MHz DSOs. But there were no public details of how the USB driver actually worked, nor the structure of the datagrams containing the trace data. Most labs use Linux by choice so to have Windows-only software is a major cause of annoyance and frustration. Lots of people requested the specs of the protocol from the company, but they stonewalled us all. So we reverse engineered the driver, and published it, along with some Linux tools to do the job that only the BillyGatesWare tool could do before. At that point, the company did a complete volte-face. Announcing its full support for Linux, it publicly released the driver specs, the USB protocol, and the datagram format for its scope. Today, the same company has regressed all the way back to stage one. It's released a new and improved range of scopes, but again with a closed source Windows-only driver for retrieving trace data. And in doing so it has annoyed the Linux community all over again. What a crazy company!