This section is, by definition, incomplete. Feel free to send in details of your favourite distribution.
Red Hat has a GUI printer administration tool (in the control panel)
which can add remote printers and printers on local devices. It lets
you choose a ghostscript-supported printer type and Unix device file
to print to, then installs a print queue in /etc/printcap and
writes a short PostScript-and-ascii magic filter based around gs
and
nenscript.
This solution works fairly well, and is trivial to setup for common
cases.
Where Red Hat fails is when you have a printer which isn't supported by their standard Ghostscript (which is GNU rather than Aladdin Ghostscript, and which supports fewer printers). Check in the printer compatibility list above (or online) if you find that you can't print properly with the stock Red Hat software. If your printer isn't supported by Red Hat's tools, you may need to install a contributed verison of Aladdin Ghostscript, and will probably also be better off if you use the apsfilter package, which knows all about the printers supported by late-model Ghostscripts.
Debian offers a choice between plain lpd and LPRng; LPRng is probably a better choice. I believe Debian also offers a choice of printer configuration tools; apsfilter version 5 or later is probably your best bet, since that verison adds support for LPRng and Ghostscript's uniprint driver scheme.
Please send me info on what other distributions do!