Oh god yes printers in general are awful and scammy, so I totally understand your hesitation! You shouldn't need any special software unless you plan to shoot in raw format, but you can change that setting in the camera and it probably defaults to jpeg anyways -- raw is great if you want absolutely lossless data since there's always some compression in jpeg, but you'll have to convert raw to some other format eventually anyways (jpeg, png, or my personal favorite is tiff when working with layers). The built in windows photo viewer won't display raw files but the equivalent in Mac does iirc. The only other time I've used special software is when shooting tethered to a computer -- canon has a specific program so you can live view what the camera is seeing, which is great for composing nice shots since the computer screen is much larger than the one on the camera, and adobe Lightroom also does this, fyi -- that's typically done for product/portrait studio photography anyways.

I believe the canon rebel t6 was the first that you could connect the camera via internet/Bluetooth to transfer files remotely, but that's optional and I've never used it nor do I want to. I just use the SD card to transfer my files manually, and I have an old copy of Photoshop cs6 (before the subscription-based cc) that I use for editing if/when I feel like it. Gimp is probably better but I learned Photoshop and just couldn't get myself to learn an entirely different program.