My mom recently asked me to print something on her old HP printer from her laptop with Windows.

I was having a hard time (the laptop runs very slowly although it is an i5 with 16GB of RAM) so I installed hplip on my laptop and printed it from there.

I had to smile at how easy things have become in Linux that Windows got me frustrated and Linux solved the issue so quickly.

Yes. I had a printer that decided that the ink pad was full. Presumably you're supposed to throw the printer away at that point? The windows option was some dodgy warez type thing that you have to pay for. Debian just had a package on the repo.