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Printing in Linux: it doesn't go automatic. Ok, one can say you just have to follow the Gentoo Printing Guide wich is very clear and makes installing a printer very, very easy (just a few commands), but I think we could expect more, especially more automated and integrated in gnome.

First off all, when you have a plain linux installation, gnome and all stuff you need, with no printing devices configured: printing works. You can just print a file without configuring a printer. The big problem is that the printed document doesn't look very good. A plain color is made of textures for example, looks like printing with the first color printers or with kind of colored-grayscales. Off course I want better, so I followed the gentoo guide.

What is it all about? First of all you need to have cups and foomatic installed. No problem, cups should be installed as dependency of gnome and you still can install foomatic if you need it. Maybe CUPS/Gnome could advice you to install foomatic when configuring a printer that has some benefits when having foomatic installed. If you have an HP Deskjet printer, you also need to install the HPIJS driver wich acts like a postscript interpreter between the postscript output and the printer device. Also this one could be recommened when configuring a HP device in CUPS/Gnome. That's all for software requirements. The configuration could be automated more. Normally, you have to create a PPD-file for your printer by hand (just give the model and hardware number to foomatic) or download the right one from linuxprinting.org and place it in the cups directory. I think it must be possible to grep the required information when attaching a printer device with USB. When connecting, gnome should detect the right model, generate the appropriate ppd file and install the printer in cups. Maybe a dialog box should appear informing the user that the printer is added to cups and asking if he/she wants to review the configuration or sharing properties. This would be a real integrated desktop experience.