This section is, by definition, incomplete. Feel free to send in details of your favourite distribution. At the moment, I am aware of no distribution that supports, or even provides, the software I recommend: PDQ.
For a while, there were several packages out there all trying to make printer configuration with regular lpd easier. They probably all still exist, but one of the best and most up-to-date is Andreas Klemm's APS Filter package, which has a menu-driven printcap configurator and handles practically any type of input imaginable. If your vendor doesn't ship a nice printer setup tool, APS Filter is another choice; several distributions include apsfilter, or it's an easy add-on.
Red Hat has a GUI printer administration tool called printtool 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 uses the magic filter program from the rhs-printfilters package to support postscript and other common input types. 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.
In future versions of Red Hat the printtool will be reimplemented to support a larger list of printers and with the intent to support an eventual rhs-printfilters replacement (the current filter has difficultly with many common printers like some non-PCL DeskJets and most Lexmarks). Some VA Linux-developed PPD features may be incorporated, as well.
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.
The printing system on SuSE Linux is based on apsfilter, with some enhancements; SuSE's apsfilter will recognize all common file formats (including HTML, if html2ps is installed). There are two ways to setup printers on SuSE systems:
The SuSE installation manual explains both of these setup procedures.
Wolf Rogner reported some difficulties with SuSE. Apparently the following bugs may bite:
Please send me info on what other distributions do!