I used to feel this way with 2% cash back, but I don’t think it’s worth the privacy loss of giving a for-profit corporation all of my spending data. Where I live now, almost no one accepts credit cards in person & if they do, there’s a high minimum payment & you will be paying the transaction fee. After getting used to carrying cash again, I can confidently say I prefer the anonymity. What weirder in hindsight is many other places either not accepting cash or baking the credit fees into the prices so it’s cash payers getting screwed—meanwhile the credit companies get to skim fixed costs while providing minimal value.
Yet color management seems to have negative priority for Wayland while the Wayland push is strong at present. Shit or not, at least X11 has basic color management via ICC profiles; Wayland be like ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I can use Fish’s history to jog my brain on actions I don’t quite remember. Remembering a sequence of screen menus to click thru is often much more tedious & error-prone. And when you have a commonly repeated process, it’s trivial to script because shell scripts are, well, scripts for that terminal shell.
Also the terminals applications are hella portable. I can use ssh/mosh over the network & have a similar or exact environment as my main PC on a remote box. vi was always a good enough editor.
If looking to put in the work while also leveling up in programming since you have some basic experience already, NixOS/Guix should be on your shortlist.
Both have programmatic, declarative configuration instead of a mangle of configuration files that tend to break with entropy as software developers update config files & it’s very easy to miss a broken build until you restart (I remember when PAM had an update & a lot of folks, including myself, panicked as they could no longer log into their machines). Since these config files are tied to versions of software, such issues are much rarer, & with stateless config you get rollbacks to previous working versions for free. Both ship with a powerful package manager that can replace bad programming language package management & tools with overhead like Docker.
The biggest downside is having to learn Nix (language) or Guile Scheme to be able to script your config, but once you get the hang of it, it’s hard to feel confident in any stateful system & you learned valuable skills for package management.
Then I guess you’ve never met the most populated continent that seems to be alright as is.
But also we could have free transit before the internet. Wrapping something in technology doesn’t mean its better. A smart watch doesn’t tell you the time any better than are without Bluetooth.
I live in Asia & I’m real happy cash is preferred for everywhere. It’s not some tech startup or credit card’s business how/when I’m spending my money & it’s never been difficult to hand currency to the driver.
All of these devices emit traceable signals. If someone doesn’t want to be tracked, which there are tools that do this, folks should have the option to opt out as paper & coins have worked fine for a millennia. But also what you are now proposing is that Google & Apple, two ad companies, get to take a piece of the pie for doing nothing and collecting that user data of what user is going where/when.