Tell me more about these cow orks.

The correct term is cow-orker (n. sing. masc.). See also, http://www.fact-index.com/c/co/cow_orker.html

I recommend my python script, Tonto2.

• https://pypi.org/project/tonto2/

What does Tonto2 do?

It keeps lists.

You can use lists to keep in touch with family, friends, and cow-orkers.

Tonto2 keeps four kinds of lists:

• You can use an address list to keep track of contacts’ phone numbers, mailing addresses, and eMail addresses.

• You can use a calendar to remind you about events and appointments including date, time, and duration. You can add notes about finding the location and other prerequisites to attendance.

• You can keep separate passwords in a password list for every website you visit and every piece of gear you own.

• You can keep links to favorite websites in a bookmark list.

Additionally you can make a list of bibliographic entries for writing research papers and for saving well-formatted footnotes for Web sites, but this is an arcane topic that will probably not be of general interest.

The information in these lists is at your fingertips.

You own it, and you can keep it. You can share it piecemeal with other people and computers without having to trust anyone or any thing with the whole enchilada. This is the idea of Tonto2.

Exactly! I harbor nostalgia for the old Windows 3 desktop icon grid, so I open a file manager window pointing to ~/Desktop and display the *.desktop shortcuts there as icons. This is done automatically when gdm starts. My file manager is PCManFM, which is a rip-off of nautilus. Double-clicking on an icon opens the shortcut — be it to a terminal or a graphical application. I have to alt-tab to the PCManFM window of course, so I need the keyboard. Then I have to double-click with the mouse. It’s keeping both hemispheres of the brain active: subject/verb, left/right. Presumably you can map your game controller’s buttons to keyboard equivalents like <right cursor>, <tab>, and <enter> (or map your game controller’s buttons to PCManFM’s hot key config), which would allow you to navigate the PCManFM icon grid.

What prevents you from uploading a picture of someone else?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog

I hit the super-key, type terminal, hit enter

I harbor nostalgia for the old Windows 3 desktop icon grid, so I open a file manager window pointing to ~/Desktop and display the *.desktop shortcuts there as icons. This is done automatically when gdm starts. My file manager is PCManFM, which is a rip-off of nautilus. Double-clicking on an icon opens the shortcut — be it to a terminal or a graphical application. I have to alt-tab to the PCManFM window of course, so I need the keyboard. Then I have to double-click with the mouse. It’s keeping both hemispheres of the brain active: subject/verb, left/right.

then I have a terminal which does not start maximized on workspace 1

I run devilspie in the background to catch windows of certain applications such as terminal and maximize them on the fly. For this reason, I must disable wayland.

Does the vanilla Gnome workflow expect you to use mouse and keyboard?

Yes, both, apparently.

It just seems like a lot of work/clicks/keys to achieve something simple.

Well, that’s what you get for downplaying the role of icon grids.

The ideological issue (which you probably don’t care about) is that it pretty much requires proprietary (non-FOSS) drivers which run in kernel space and so in theory have complete access to all data on your computer (but then so does Intel ME). This is the main reason I personally will never use NVidia cards.

The only meltdown I’ve had with Linux occurred on a minor rev-level update to Debian that plugged some hole in the kernel the NVidia proprietary driver was crawling through. I had used Debian and an NVidia proprietary driver for years on an ancient motherboard. Then suddenly that “solution” disappeared. I had to replace the whole machine. Yeah, it was time. No, I wasn’t ready. I don’t know whether I should have been more pissed at Debian or NVidia, but I’m still on Debian. After the kernel update, X11 reverted to a default driver, and no install, uninstall, reinstall combination of the proprietary drivers seemed efficacious. I’m sorry I don’t remember the exact software rev-levels and drivers involved. All notes I took at the time, if any, were lost in the subsequent crash and recovery from incompetently trying to roll back the kernel update.