No mini KDE I'm afraid
I'm not familiar with samba shared printers, but I'll ask my sysadmin - he deals with printers, and cups as well as lpr(ng).

Edit: Talked to the sysadmin. As far as I can understand it, lpr/lprng can print to samba shared printers that have been set up to also support the lpr/lpd protocol - in other words, when they look like Unix printers too. From what I understand this is needed for CUPS to access them too, although a CUPS server controlling a printer can also export that printer as a samba shared printer, for the convenience of Windows machines.
The biggest difference between the CUPS system and the LPR/LPD system is that CUPS daemons keep talking among themselves on additional communication ports, in addition to being able to just print to lpr/lpd-enabled printers. I've found that systems running just lpr/lpd (or lprng) can print to any printers managed by either their local CUPS systems, or BSD LPD, or directly networked printers (which tend to support the lpr/lpd protocol first, but some of them also supports the newer additional IPP protocol which CUPS also uses.)
It's probably better to check the authorative sources, so I looked at wikipedia and quote this part:

Compatibility
CUPS provides both the System V and Berkeley printing commands so the traditional commands for printing can be used for CUPS. CUPS listens on port 515, which is the traditional LPD port (it treats this as a 'backend'). When CUPS is installed the lp System V printing system command and the lpr Berkeley printing system commands are installed as compatible programs. This allows a standard interface to CUPS and allows maximum compatibility with existing applications that rely on these printing systems.

(the 'Berkeley printing commands' mentioned above refers to the lpr/lpd, or BSD LPR systems I've been talking about earlier.)
For my own needs, I would install CUPS on a computer where a printer is physically connected, and use either a subset CUPS on a client machine (if the CUPS system on the computer with the printer has all the filters you won't actually need any on the client), or just BSD LPR or LPRNG. So that's why I put together the lprng package, it does just what's needed for me.