I posted about this on the KDE community a couple of weeks ago, but Dolphin (their file manager) has a nice trick for archives (zips, tar’s, etc) - in the extract menu, there’s an “Extract, Autodetect Subfolder” button which will:

• If the archive has an inner subfolder (and just that), it will extract this as expected
• If the archive doesn’t have an inner subfolder, and all the files are at the root level, it will create a new folder for you and extract the files there

This way, you don’t end up with files splattered all over say, your downloads folder. Easily one of my favorite features, and is something I wish every File Manager had. It feels like someone had the same pain that I do (and I’m sure plenty others) of extracting something, and regretting it - but then they went as far as to fix the problem for everyone and implemented a feature for it (I’d love to have the knowledge to contribute to KDE someday)!

Ctrl + enter to open a new window of an application on gnome

Bit of an obvious one but try out new DEs in a VM before installing it on hardware. It is a pretty big time saver especially if you are ricing it.

Other than that looking at extensions for file managers you use. There’s some neat ones and the Arch Wiki is a good place to find them

One I just discovered recently - in KDE, holding the Super Key & right mouse button lets you resize a window from anywhere so you don’t have to hunt around for the one corner pixel to resize it.

No idea if it works in Gnome or other DE’s, but might be worth a try!

Mouse gestures in Plasma.

Just draw a shape, make it mimic a keyboard shortcut, run a script, launch a program, whatever. Such a nice feature that I use constantly.

I’m really enjoying Mission Center - especially compared to the default app on Pop!_OS.

btop is also really good if you want something in the terminal

Control + s in Gnome to jump into the search bar. This works for all Gnome apps

@imgel I wouldn’t consider #e16 a DE (still count?); but using that, I prefer having a frame-only window decoration. I use a simple #xdotool line in my #conkyrc to display the currently focused window.

${exec 'xdotool getactivewindow getwindowname'}

I’ve also used a combination of xdotool, randr, and eesh in the past to do tiling and arrangement.