In the end, most of the time, our day to day needs can be covered by very simple software - text editors, spreadsheets, messaging (including email), threaded discussions, and not that much else.
Is a spreadsheet even necessary on the go? Might be better to just have a calculator and store values in a text file?
Also, music? Or is this really a luxury? Truthfully I think yes. But maybe there are some "sound programs" which are "necessary" (like white noise generation)?
I'm sure a lot of us have had this line of thinking many times, but it'd be nice to have a discussion around it :)
I'd say music is fair. The notion of using a desktop computer to listen to music was always a bit strange to me.
Also, a phone, because it's very useful to remain connected (I instruct everyone who works with me that, if they want synchronous responses, they should phone me. All other are asynchronous with low QoS.
You might be right technically, but one of the features of a spreadsheet is that it stores formulae. (Like a programmable calculator.) Even better, it does it spatially (which fits the way many people remember things), so after a while you can train yourself to put "kilometers driven here, amount of liters of gas there, and your gas usage per 100km is over there" etc. You can do this in a text file, too, of course (see e.g. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/calc/Emb...), but a text file is essentially 1-dimensional, which may be a drawback here.
Necessary, no, not by any means. But it is certainly a very-nice-to-have. Something far simpler than Excel would do but as it runs on my phone and I have a licence, why not?¹
> just have a calculator and store values in a text file?
That would be something new to learn and/or a manual process.
I use spreadsheets for little repetitive calcs, or even non-repetitive ones that I want to remember after I've lost the bit of paper from my pocket that they'd otherwise be on. This doesn't happen on-the-go often, but when it does it is handy to have something that lets me go back and edit the calcs easily, and automatically keeps the results rather than me copying them from calculator to notepad. The middle ground that is a logging calculator app could deal with some of these use cases, of course, as long as it has the range of functions a reasonable spreadsheet has (usually I'm just totting up money, but sometimes time-base calculations are useful, or unit conversions (though 1.609 sticks in my mind better than I remember what Excel's CONVERT() function calls miles so usually those are done from memory not with a built-in function), and so on).
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[1] other than the fact it seems to have sync problems, so I never trust it to edit workbooks created elsewhere