My mom has bought a couple of HP ink jet printers. The software has been terrible. That seems to be the case, that consumer inkjets have terrible software and lasers are fine.

At one point while trying to figure out something else, I figured out that they had implemented the polling for the presence of the (usb) printer by having a Windows service rapidly and repeatedly start and stop a second service. So anytime the printer was unplugged, the logs would be nicely purged by this activity.

I don't remember if it was related to those services, but they also screwed up the permissions for a service, making it impossible to use the normal tools to make changes to the service.

The thinner drivers included in Windows 10 with her new computer seem to be better.

It seems to have gone in both directions, the class drivers on Windows are pretty much all configuration and little or no real software. However most printer manufacturers can't seem to resist bundling extra software to manage the printer, sell you consumables, etc.

Most printers today do not have hardware PCL or PostScript. Inkjet printers, and cheaper laser printers, usually act a lot like the older "winmodems" in that they offset almost everything that used to be done internally to the host computer, including at least rasterization and even aspects of what seem like basic motor control. This is a cost-saving measure in the printers themselves, but comes at the expense of significantly more complicated and device-specific host-side software.