Rectangle is very handy for moving and resizing windows with a keyboard.

If you use Homebrew, you can disable analytics.

export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1

or

brew analytics off

Other than that, try not to leave terminal I guess

Use an alternative to Finder

Replacing BSD utils with GNU utils is quite useful if you’re coming from Linux

• Re-encode your videos to a format your GPU can decode natively because CPU/software decoding makes the fans turn on on Intel Macs.

• Use SoundSource. Super useful. Every program needing to input or output sound can be rerouted. I have my 3 music and one video players playing through my TV and its awesome soundbar, one browser (Edge) I only use for conferencing and it has microphone directed at great headphones but the sound is still through my Mac’s speakers, I have another browser only direct sound to my Airpods Max headphones, and I have another video player playing on Mac’s speakers. Telegram / Slack / Zoom sound always goes to my dedicated conferencing headphones. Etc. Again, very useful piece of software. Hope Linux can provide something similar when I migrate to it.

• Use BetterDisplay. Helps me force my aging TV to always be in 60Hz mode (my Mac had the nasty habit to always default it to 30Hz) but it’s also a very nice centralised place to manage your displays in depth. It was also the only UI program I was able to find that managed to control my TV’s brightness through software (I could use CLI tools for it but it’s not something I enjoy reaching the terminal for; a glaring exception in my case). Oh, actually there’s also EasyRes but it has much less features.

• Use Alfred and not Spotlight.

• I still use iStat Menus and not Stats but that might change. Just haven’t bothered. I have noticed that since Sequoia (macOS 15x.) the CPU reporting is not accurate but that might be due to the OS itself because even htop was not able to find what made my Mac work more and get hotter. One thing that iStat Menus helped me with was devise my own fan control logic, one that I eventually dropped because I concluded that the system built-in one was smarter than mine but still, I like having the option.

I went even further: I have aliased cp to call gcp and all others. For 6 full years using this Mac I think I have encountered an issue only once or twice and hot-fixed the script and all was well.

Yes I did the same, there’s a script/command that prints out how to do it after you brew install it.