Replying six months late — not for OP (glad you found your way, Mint is a solid choice), but for everyone who lands here later with the same problem, the way I used to land in old threads like this one.

1. You may not need a driver at all. The "install the driver" guides are often outdated advice. Driverless printing has been an industry standard for over a decade: Apple's AirPrint since 2010, and IPP Everywhere / Mopria since 2013, when the printer manufacturers (Canon, HP, Samsung, Xerox and others) formed the Mopria Alliance. Practically every network printer built since ~2013 speaks at least one of these — the printer itself tells the system what it can do, no vendor driver involved. And here's the proof you already own: your smartphone has been printing exactly this way all along. Nobody has ever installed a printer driver on a phone — Android and iOS simply have no other mechanism than these open standards. If your printer works from your phone, it can work driverless from Linux too, on every distro including immutable ones like Bazzite. The "garbage page + hundreds of blank pages" symptom is typically a wrong driver rendering junk — removing the vendor driver setup and re-adding the printer as a network/driverless printer (CUPS picks "IPP Everywhere" as the model) often just fixes it. That's also why the Epson story above worked in one click: that wasn't Bazzite being magic, it was driverless printing doing its job.

2. Shameless-but-honest plug: I'm a 45-year-old car mechanic from Austria, not a dev — probably not the typical person you'd expect in these threads. Printing was my own "why is this so hard" moment on Linux, so I built a small FOSS tool for it: PrintEase (https://github.com/MrHaku81/print-ease). It's a GTK4 app that auto-discovers driverless printers/scanners on your network (IPP Everywhere + eSCL scanning) and shows you honestly what the device itself reports — capabilities, paper sizes, duplex, the lot. No vendor drivers, no config files. GPL, 34 languages.

Install options by distro:

• Ubuntu 24.04+ / Mint 22+ / Zorin 18+ (and other noble-based): sudo add-apt-repository ppa:haku81/printease && sudo apt install print-ease
• Arch / CachyOS / EndeavourOS / Manjaro: paru -S print-ease (AUR)
• Fedora / openSUSE / others: from source — git clone, pip install -e . (deps: GTK4, PyGObject, pycups; see README)
• Bazzite / Silverblue / immutable distros: honestly, no first-class option yet — a Flatpak is in the works precisely for this case. Until then: run it in a distrobox (Ubuntu or Arch box), or just use the driverless tip above, which needs no extra software at all.

One honest limitation: if a printer genuinely needs a legacy driver (some older Brother laser models want brlaser), or is USB-only without network, no tool talks around that — driverless only works if the printer speaks the standard. Check your printer's build year and spec for "AirPrint" or "Mopria" support; if it's from ~2013 or later and has WiFi/LAN, you're one network discovery away from never thinking about printer drivers again.

I don't hang around social platforms much, but if you find this and have questions — issues and questions on the GitHub repo are welcome, I do answer.