Ozymandias

I don’t use yay so can’t help you there. For me the most useful pacman commands just got memorized after doing an install. I don’t think you need to memorize that much.

But to your question, instead of mnemonics you could use aliases instead for bash or zsh. that way you can use your own made up commands (or even mnemonics)

I do. I guess it depends on your workflow though. Gnome tries to get out of the way and is quite minimal. I’m that way too, like to keep my desk uncluttered for example. I couldn’t even imagine a task that requires me to have 10 programs open, but if I had to, I guess I would try to group them on workspaces and try to limit the amount. Would be far easier for me to remember that way.

I’ve tried other DE’s and window managers, but they all feel like taking a huge step backwards to me. You should however try to find something that suits you the best, maybe KDE?

Gnome without extensions. It gets out of the way and let’s me work. Whenever I have to use something else, it feels like going backwards in time. I used to love tinkering with my system and tried a lot of DE’s back in the days. Don’t have the time for that anymore.

I did have to adjust though. I think that a lot of the hate gnome gets is because of this. If you espect it to work like a traditional desktop you’re going to get frustrated and install too many extensions to make it like one. My advise would be to set aside your presumptions and try it like it’s meant to be used. You might be surprised, I know I was…

A while ago I found this video, which explains it in more detail.