It's been plug and play both at home and at work for me since a few years (sorry, can't be more specific...). And it was really far from it years ago for sure!

It's been plug and play both at home and at work for me since a few years (sorry, can't be more specific...). And it was really far from it years ago for sure! In both cases the printers support IPP (the Internet Printing Protocol) and are advertised on the LAN, either natively at home or through a print server at work. I've never digged much into this, but I believe the combination of zeroconf (for the printers discovery) and IPP are the key elements for CUPS to provide this seamless support. The printers just show up in the my KDE settings, and their settings are exposed in a reasonable way through configuration dialogs. The ink or toner levels are even visible. This is on Debian stable, so I would assume most distros are at this level now.