(Edit: should specify this is aimed at the phones and qr codes system!) That would absolutely ruin the atmosphere for me though, the character of a bar is the bustle and people standing around as well as the chatter you get sometimes.
Removing all that and just having people tap away at their phones while the bar staff silently make drinks, then people walking to a box to grab theirs honestly sounds uninviting.
Nice concept on paper but it'd ruin a bar for me.
I mean you know better than me (I'm not even on twitter so everything i see is just the internet perspective of it). I'll take your word for it as you're probably right!
I wasn't really involved with social media back then sadly, but yes I did get that general impression. Before all the toxicity really overtook it around 2020 it did seem quite pleasant.
Shame really, corporate greed taking something quite nice and milking it so hard it's absolutely ruined. Then again, it gives way to things like bluesky so i guess it has its upsides!
Having never been on twitter myself I'm especially entertained, watching and laughing from a far corner of the internet
Just FYI, you can duplicate an entire google docs/sheets/slides document by going File > Make a Copy, and in your case preserve comments by checking the relevant box!
Motivations by the company have been explained far better than I could by the other replies, but from both mine and other people's experience, some software when installed via snaps seems to perform badly compared to any other method of installation (notably chrome and firefox i think). Also snap isn't really bringing anything special to the table whereas flatpak has a more interesting containerised approach from what I'm aware.
In any case with the way ubuntu's going I'm really not over the moon with anything canonical (and i don't think I'm alone)
There's norway i could've come up with that pun, I'm impressed
From what I understand and to continue your example of Ubuntu-based distros:
As you say, Ubuntu itself is corporate-driven, so there are things in there that exist pretty much solely to benefit Canonical (e.g the telemetry they recently introduced if i recall correctly)
Most of the time when basing distros off of others, I think it's to keep a lot of features - either to save dev time or because they only want to tweak a small portion of the distro and not write a new one from scratch.
Because devs can modify the entire codebase, they can remove features that are corporate-driven (telemetry and such) and effectively create something fully (or mostly) compatible yet without such features.
Another major example imo is the removal of snaps, which most people (myself included) strongly dislike - as far as I'm aware removing them in Ubuntu itself is quite a difficult process as it's baked into the distro itself. I imagine a lot of people want something like Ubuntu as it is quite friendly and has one of the lower bars of entry for Linux, but object to corporate things like telemetry and the overall monstrosity that is snaps.
Apologies, i went down a bit of a tangent, but I hope that roughly answers your question!
Perhaps it's the case that if there are specific 'safe-use' spaces, people won't have to do such things in their own home and instead have other places to do - if people have somewhere where they can safely consume drugs and have medical help/supervision then theoretically the need to do that in private becomes unnecessary?
I see your point however as I only have a 20 minute daily commute and yet still often come across the smell of weed once or twice!
That's an interesting idea, I suppose it's possible if you have one or more databases with these statistics and then link them together and see. My instincts tell me that it'd be very impractical to implement though!
I have a pretty horrible sense of direction, and I find that looking for important (clearly visible) landmarks helps reorient me, as well as relying on a minimap wherever available. Also if there's any way to place markers or waypoints to show you a route then that helps too. Navigating still sucks but it's a bit less painful with those!
I know KDE has a calendar, not sure how well it'd work for your use case but it's there!