Perhaps you're thinking back to the days of manually configuring CUPS?
Any recent printer I've used has just been plug it in and hit print. A better experience than Windows in terms of included drivers and bonjour support too.
Any recent printer I've used has just been plug it in and hit print. A better experience than Windows in terms of included drivers and bonjour support too.
It's never been that way for Windows: you've obviously never used a network printer in a large office.
By contrast, I had a contract job a year or so ago at a large company where I was given a Win7 laptop and tried to connect to a big Ricoh laser printer. I spent hours messing around with driver downloads trying to get that to work. I finally had to call IT and they sent someone over, and he couldn't get it to work either; he finally found some crazy work-around which I've totally forgotten the details of now.
The only real problem I see with printing on Linux now is that, sometimes, there's multiple CUPS drivers for the same printer (foomatic, hpijs, Postscript, etc.), so it won't automatically pick one and it's not clear which is the best so you might have to just try one and see if it works. Most likely, they all work, but some might have additional features. HP printers are probably the best, though, since they seem to explicitly support Linux (such as with their hpijs drivers). If all printer makers had this level of support, and they cleaned up the redundant/competing drivers, there wouldn't be complaints.
Part of this is the byzantine config of network discovery, CUPS, driver sources, etc. A big part of the problem is the pieces may be there but distros have done a mediocre job getting everything together on this in the best way for the user.