Printing on the Free Desktop is an "horror story". I'm not the one making that claim, Eric S. Raymond did it[1] around 4 years ago, but I agree with it. Meanwhile things have improved but not by much. In particular, the GNOME desktop, unfortunately, still lacks an integrated printer management tool that is easy to use, acronym free and actually works.

As proposed on the GNOME project's GSoC 2008 list of projects I intend to research the problem space thoroughly and finally implement a well integrated printing management tool that gets the job done and leaves the user free to actually print instead of fighting printing configuration.

Said tool shall work as best as possible with the current de-facto printing system on the Free Desktops, CUPS. It should also use modern hardware abstraction, policy definition and session management frameworks (HAL, PolicyKit and ConsoleKit) to make intelligent decisions about local and networked printer hardware on the dynamically connected computer systems we use today.

[1] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html