IMO, GPG has a pretty terrible CLI. GPG agent config is complicated and is more of a pain to get working with forwarding etc. I don’t like the fact that GPG requires config at all. I also have no use for it, that I can’t solve with something nicer. I use age/sops for my encryption-related use cases. If I needed signing, I’d probably use minisign or signify. For authentication, Wireguard/SSH.

But for the SSH key use case, none of this matters. Unless you need compatibility with old SSH servers/clients, resident keys are substantially simpler, because they cut out 1 tool entirely and don’t require copying any directories to other machines.

I get it. The man pages for GPG are like reading War And Peace, whereas the man pages for Age is easily digestible. I too use Age for certain things, but have to use GPG in some of my workflows. But I find it no harder than some insane Helm chart values.yaml files, or some crazy assed Terraform runs with a tfvars file that has hundreds of lines to merely spin up a bucket or vpc. It's just another tool that you need to config and understand.

> But for the SSH key use case, none of this matters.

Agreed.