Its not a troll comment. I just spent 3 hours poring over how CUPS worked in 12.04 and trying to find out why my USB printer is not working. I just could not fix it and rebooted my laptop to Windows to print. And this after installing the official drivers and reading the official install guide, etc. The damned thing was that they have changed CUPS yet again in 12.04 and whatever the official docs says is not valid anymore.
This sort of thing has been there around Linux for ever. I have reached a stage where I am just too bored to do the endless investigation and fixing any more. I will just use Windows, which contrary to all the complaints that people keep making, actually "just works"