I bought a cheap Samsung all-in-one printer yesterday, and not having much time, didn't go reading all over the web for Linux installation instructions. I just downloaded their Linux driver pack from the website (a .tar.gz file, about 30 MB!) and read through the install script. It looked quite friendly, so I ran it as root (!!!) on my Debian Lenny box.
It installed the right PPD file for cups, checked that normal users were in the correct user group to be able to print, set up SANE correctly and so on.
As part of my testing, I tried "ls | lpr" - WTF, a GUI?
It turns out it installs its own GUI version of lpr, but renames the old one to "lpr.orig". So lpr.orig works as normal, and lp still works normally, but when you print things from openoffice or xpdf with the default command, you get a typical "printer settings" screen, which isn't a bad thing for normal users.
There's also a GUI "printer settings" application which it for some reason puts on the KDE desktop (oh well), and if you do "print test page" it actually prints out a CUPS test page! Sane works very nicely with the scanner, and knows when you put something in the document feeder (the preview window vanishes!)
Bottom line: Samsung actually pay people who know something about *nix to hack away at making their printer installation beginner-friendly, and if that's not good enough for you, if you don't want "all that other stuff", you can do your own custom install, for example by grabbing the ppd file out of their install tarball.
(Edit: I have since learned that free and open drivers are available through the splix project.)
That's very cool in my book.
Apart from all the cool stuff for people who don't read instructions, would you recommend Samsung printers in general?
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