I agree about your description about printers, but I wouldn’t call them “evil”. I’m trying to think of the best word to describe them… haunted? bizarre? chaotic? random? mysterious? No wait, I know; the perfect word is opaque. They do weird stuff and you don’t know why, and you can’t look inside them and find out why. Hmm, now that I’ve come to this conclusion, the answer seems to be the same obvious one that we already have for the similar problem of opaque software and operating systems. Free software, so you can actually look inside and debug the things when your system/printer has found some new way to confound you.

I seem to recall that the original story about how Richard Stallman was inspired to create the concept of free software was that he was stymied by proprietary software in a printer, so this would simply bring the concept back to its roots, so to speak.