PCL5 is well supported in my experience. PCL6 on more modern printers. Compared to Linux, the Windows printing experience is easy. 99.9% of the time, you go into your settings, click on devices, click on "add device" and wait for the printer to show up (usually within 30 seconds, sometimes takes 2-3 minutes). Then you click that and you can print. That is the 99.9% case.
On Linux you're way less lucky if you wanna print, god forbid the document is more complex than a text file.
? Connect printer, print? That's been my general experience, and we've also been printing through Linux at work for decades now - and with CUPS about since it arrived. The number of printers we've been through I have lost count of, but they work. We print all kind of documents, at sometimes an industrial scale. And of course it doesn't matter what the document is, pure text or not.
At the home front the HP printers "just work", the only slightly tricky one was a Ricoh laser printer I was given - it doesn't use PS or PCL but instead its own system. That needed a 3rd party driver.
Printers are one of those corners of linux that still resemble the winmodem days: if it works right away it just works, but if it doesn't, you're probably out of luck. That's because drivers are key and manufacturers have little incentive to keep updated drivers in CUPS - particularly for cheaper models and cheaper brands. Industrial-grade models and brands are more likely to have had a driver done for some reason or another (big contract in civil service etc).
I bought a Lexmark Laser Printer a while ago. CUPS doesn't recognize this printer automatically, you have to add it manually. So you have to go through a dialog that is basically user hostile and I can't imagine how many people with less technical knowledge give up here.
Regardless of using PCL6 or the Lexmark driver from Lexmark, the printer continues to be unable to print PDFs directly from the browser. Other PDF viewers print normally. CUPS logs no error but prints it on a piece of paper instead.
When attempting to view the print queue of my printer, it crashes if a document is being sent but has not started pritning yet. It is fine if the document is queued but not printing.
Sometimes, CUPS doesn't print the document immediately but waits 30 minutes. Other documents sent to the queue in the mean time print immediately. Sometimes the program that attempts to print causes a hard lockup in CUPS, so I have to restart the CUPS service.
"Connect printer" isn't the easiest in CUPS if it decides that autodiscovery doesn't do it, which it often does.
Great anecdote, but I have at least a thousand stories like this in Windows.
My favorite one is how a guy in my office one day was not able to print. Well he could print, but only from applications that used the really, really old Windows printing API. So basically you could print from Notepad, and that was it.
We tried everything to get printing to work, but could not figure out the problem. This led to a wipe and reload of the OS. After I got it reloaded, I tested out printing, and it worked great. Success!
Next day, he comes in and is again not able to print. Turns out that the problem was due to the drivers from his personal HP printer at home. The printer was auto-detected, and Windows automatically downloaded the new driver for that printer. That somehow fucked up the entire printing subsystem again so no printers would work at all.
On Linux you're way less lucky if you wanna print, god forbid the document is more complex than a text file.