I seem to recall I had a windows phone at the time, with a full keyboard. I could use OS maps on the thing, and although it didn't have GPS, it could get my rough location by tower.
My mate had an iPhone, and it had an app where you could pretend to drink a pint of beer.
I think this is an area where stricter regulation would be appreciated. Just needs an additional checkbox on the regular MOT forms, and all cars would be compliant within a year.
Additionally, car designers should leave headlights and indicators alone, unless they are making the vehicles safer. The first time I encountered an oncoming car with a horizontal LED strip between the lights, I had no idea what style of vehicle was oncoming.
You can use emacs and tramp to edit files remotely within a local buffer. If you lose connection it doesn't matter, you still have the file, and when you save it auto connects. I often use this with Python and can execute the scripts within emacs with the results being sent back to another buffer.
You can also use eshell or even just shell (if you're not into lisp) within emacs once you are on the remote machine to execute bash commands, with scrolling.
I think that's what is being referred to, but I'm no expert.
Nowadays the OS means far less to me than my windows manager. I use nixos because I like the fact that I can see and configure the state of my machine in a few text files, but that does not give me a huge productivity boost.
Like the OP I use i3, and every time I have to use Windows or macOS I feel like I'm using a crippled machine. If I could put i3 on Windows or macOS, then I'd happily switch. With brew or wsl I really wouldn't notice much of a difference, given 90% of my day is spent in emacs, a terminal or a browser.