Back in the day my operating system of choice was RISC OS. This wasn’t run on a Raspberry Pi, but a computer with just 1MB of memory. The details of how it worked are a bit fuzzy now, but it was a pioneering operating system with some good ideas. Some of these I don’t think have been implemented yet on any mainstream Linux desktop environment:
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A “send it to the back” button on a window titlebar. Yes I know you can do things like middle click on a titlebar with Marco, but that’s not very useful on a one or two button laptop. Nope, RISC OS did it better.
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If you resize a window by dragging its corner and you hit the bottom right of the screen, on RISC OS the window would automatically start to resize from the top left. That saves a lot of moving/resizing of windows.
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Visually clean applications. This maybe controversial on this forum, but RISC OS didn’t have an ugly horizontal menu because you middle clicked to get the menu. I’m not suggesting bringing back the middle click (see point 1), but the next best thing is to hide the menu in some other way. Gnome tries to do this, although they’ve made a complete mess of it. I think the best solution would be a menu button on the titlebar. This is was (EDIT: see https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=125058 ) possible with KDE and Unity proposed something like this back in 12.04. The patch for metacity is still available, could it be used on Marco? - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/metacity/+bug/931245
Thoughts? Do you have any small “I can’t believe they haven’t implemented that yet” ideas? Does an obscure desktop environment that you’ve used have a great feature that should see wider attention?
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All good suggestions to take to the next window composing software meeting, if we know were it is being held 
The thing however is that, honestly, window composition development is in limbo for many years now. Nothing really useful comes out of it. Just the sad realization that those involved in these projects apparently consider window composition is a tool to make things look cool, not functional.
What you want can be partially achieved with some of the tiling wms out there. i3 being my favorite.
And that’s my contribution to this “why haven’t they done this yet” thread: A DE that lets me easily switch between a stacking wm and a tiling wm. Productivity would soar!
marfig, thanks for the reply. I definitely think that tiling window managers are due a comeback. This is an area I’m interested bringing more into compiz (I guess I’m in the looking cool camp).
I hope my first post doesn’t come across as the rather demanding sounding “why haven’t they done this yet”? My intention was to spark ideas for future development, rather than complain about missing features.
It doesn’t have to be restricted to window managers. For example, for me combining the archive manager and file manager applications would de-clutter the desktop a lot.
No, no, no @veggrower. I was the one who didn’t miss a chance to complain 
You did ok.
Archive manager with file manager was done before, by Microsoft. Their Windows file manager still does it. Although is limited only to a small subset of the archivers out there.
You do remind of another thing. how cool would it be for our linux file managers to integrate with our package managers. If I right click a file I could be told to what package it belongs (if any), what’s the dependencies, etc etc
Yep Microsoft definitely had it sorted in Vista for zip files. It was great. I like some of their tiling ideas too!
Your last point could be done with a caja extension maybe? I’m sure there is a terminal command that does that.