I usually do nothing fancy with my windows. I open them. Later, I close them. In between, I may maximize them or unmaximize them. I move them around the screen.
The two fancy things I do are: 1) “Maximize” a window onto a portion of a screen using drag magic of some kind (most Linux desktop environments have this) or b) tell a window to move itself to a different workspace.
Most, nay, all, desktop environments have a larger set of fancy window behavior control than this. The whole idea of controlling, or even having, windows in which software runs, is fundamental to the *Nix environment, and Linux is the modern and most widely used version of *Nix. But I think it is possible that KDE has the mostest and bestest of these abilities.
For example. You can right click on the top bar on the window and pick “more actions” from the context menu. This gives you “move,” “resize” and such, which you have access to in other ways. GBut it also gives you check boxes to “keep above others” or “keep below others” which is very hand when your multiple monitors start to fill up with stuff because your workflow has gone fractal.
Burrow deeper and you can get to “special window settings.” This allows you to control behavior of a particular window in very detailed and even scary ways. You should probably not do any of this, but you should have a look.
In between these two cantos of configuration, you can find “Windows Manager Settings” in the window title bar context menu. This allows you to mess with windows decorations, screen edges, desktop effects, etc. You can get to all this via other configuration tools, but this is a handy way to make adjustments on the fly while you are actually using software.
One thing you may want to adjust here is when and how windows become translucent. I never used that feature before, and having the windows become semi-translucent when being moved is the default in KDE. I think people like this because it is a quick and dirty way to see what is behind the window. I find it a bit disconcerting because I sometimes am still reading what it is a window while I’m moving it. I wonder if there is a way to make a window go translucent optionally. Probably. OK just checked, there is.
A key feature you will want to adjust is active screen edges and corners. Here you can turn on or off features that maximize, either to a full screen or a “tile,” the window you drag to an edge. This allows for quarter tiling. Right now I have the ability to mazimize a window by dragging the title area of the title bar to the top middle of a screen, to tile over the left or right half by dragging it to the appropriate side edge, or quarter-tiling the window by dragging it to a corner. It is a bit funky when I drag towards the second monitor … can get confused as to which monitor to tile the window on.
Windows. Not just for Windows any more. Never were, really.
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Thanks for doing this series on KDE by the way. People don’t talk much about Linux desktops anymore. Or maybe I’m just not looking anymore. Anyway, Linux won, that’s all that matters. Not the desktop of course, but everything else. I did delve into “special window settings” once. It was for an application that I needed to act a certain way for some reason. I don’t remember the application or anything about how I needed it to behave but you are right, it can be very dangerous to mess around with that feature. The “keep above/below others” (I use it quite a bit) is a very handy feature. I set my title bar so when I double click on it, it maximizes vertically only. It’s handy when you have a long list of things or when a window pops up and you need it to stretch the full height of the monitor but not the width like your browser.