Great article from one of the more famous Open Source contributors. Been down this road a few times.

"I've just gone through the experience of trying to configure CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. It has proved a textbook lesson in why nontechnical people run screaming from Unix. This is all the more frustrating because the developers of CUPS have obviously tried hard to produce an accessible system — but the best intentions and effort have led to a system which despite its superficial pseudo-friendliness is so undiscoverable that it might as well have been written in ancient Sanskrit."

"So, let's review. In order for the nice, user-friendly autoconfiguration stuff to work, you have to first edit an /etc file. On a different machine than the one you're trying to set up. You have to read the comments in configuration file to know that you need to do this ubn the first place.

What a truly lovely, classic blunder this is. That they turned off the autoconfiguration support is understandable from a security-engineering point of view. But failing to mention this in the Administrator's Guide, and failing to warn the user during the configuration-wizard dialogue that operating printers may not be visible unless your site admin has performed the appropriate ritual on the printers' host machines...that is moronically thoughtless."

I suggest you read the whole thing. If you have ever wrestled with Linux and it made you question if you had a clue, then it is comforting to know that experts run into the same problems.