>This makes you a rare example. I’ve been saying for years that the real computer revolution will happen when people work with computers, rather than on computers.
Heh, it's funny you mention that, because I always had a deeply rooted philosophical belief that computers are tools, and a properly configured computing device is an "extension" of oneself. Not in some crazy cyberpunk sense of extension, but same as regular, old-school tools are customizable to better suit the user's hand, size or strength, so we can perform better with them, as if the tool was a part of our body.
Sure, it does require a certain amount of know-how, but even at the barest there's some degree of organizational feature like moving launcher icons so you can reach for a tool without jumping through hoops. Every "papercut" removed helps.
For example, this week I had a bit of a need to get text from some images. It's short enough bits of text that can be typed by hand, but that's annoying, so I set up a couple scripts to get the text via OCR and copy it to clipboard, after massaging the input a little bit using imageMagick, and now I can quickly retrieve it with ridiculously small % of failure (and it's usually very obvious), and works with Japanese and everything. At least half a minute of back-and-forth was turned into a keypress and a verification step (I usually double-check what I type so that step was going to happen anyway). It's a tiny thing and not even remotely my finest work in the field, but everything adds up. Got lots of homemade tools to do pretty much everything I do regularly, and properly commented so it serves as a bit of a personal repo of arcane tricks and best practices. I even recoded a few tools in pure bash or awk/gawk so I can carry them around as fallbacks, which allows me to use those things in obsolete or busybox-tier systems.
At this point I might as well admit it's a bit of a hobby. Having artistic skills also allows me to "brand" my system with custom decorations and of course allow me to draw comfortably by having most automation available from my left hand.
Anyway, sorry for the long personal post, but the point is to use my experience as example of the things the computer can do for you if you are willing to put some time into making it behave the way you want, the way it suits your own usages, experiences and abilities and of course environment. Maybe all you need to be happily productive are a few custom document templates and rearranging some icons, or you do complex coding tasks that can be automated to save you from lots of busywork, or you are working with faulty hardware or unstable internet connection that requires some babysitting that can be automated with a few scripts. I'm not saying it's something everyone should know, but it might be useful for people to openly discuss their use cases and experiences, someone might have a recommendation or trick available and everyone wins. It's a lot like working in the kitchen if you think about it.