I use G+ exactly for what the change affects, because I am developer and photographer (hobby). It is stream and photos which are going to be separated.
The current state of G+ is annoying for me. G+ is essentially great and far better for software, tech and developers than any other social nets which support blog-style postings. The reason is simply that really many people who are great are there, even Poettering (just for reference to the systemd post above).
And second thing is G+ is also great for photography. There is a huge mass of photographers who are active and generate content. I love to look at their pictures and have about 1000 photographers in my circles.
The problem: the G+ stream is cluttered. It lacks separation of topics. I like to look at photos, as I said, but when I want to read about tech the stream is hard to browse, because of all my photographer contacts. Also the same photographers might also post something, but I don't see it, because all I see are pictures everywhere. And the new content is appearing very fast. My stream has lots of updates. It is far faster than my Twitter stream with 250 contacts.
So the change will be probably OK. I cannot say before I see it, but I've noticed the problem from the start. It's interesting that Google identified it, too.
From what I've learned so far, people who use the word "cyber" should not decide about anything concerning security.
(btw, "to cyber" means "to have a dirty talk/chat online" from what I've seen how people use this awful term)
1) Google+ is probably not for friends, but for interesting people/companies/organizations/topics who you want to follow.
2) You can easily post a link which aggregates well with Facebook (this is probably the social network for people like friends and family, who you really don't want to follow, but only want to brag to about what you just ate and how cool your new mobile phone is).
Just because you are some software vendors' bitch, it does not mean that other systems not running it are not professional.
When you have your dumb Windows-based utilities, use Windows. What problem do you have with it? I also use Windows XP (32 bit) in Virtualbox, because I need some crappy old software bundled to an old USB hardware, that is all not supported anymore, but my main system is still FreeBSD/amd64.
Find me something that competes with the features and enterprise support of Exchange, Office, Lync, Sharepoint, Outlook
Unfortunately, I don't know any of these utilties except "Office" which is easily replaced by LibreOffice. The fact that I don't know them lies in the nature that don't solve anything of value for me. Maybe I am working differently from others. Instead of telling me product names, tell me what you do (I also don't want to know what you do with the products; it is wrong to describe your problems by providing me wrong approaches for solutions). There are plenty of solutions that can be used and you can also develop some for yourself for your special purpose.
What I need more is a reasonable terminal application, Xmonad as a desktop (UTF-8 support), easy integration of gnupg into a mailclient, I need ssh, tmux, text-based vim, a text-based IRC client, a full compiler suite which is ready-to-use. I also need inspection tools for all my system components. And I need a reasonable way to manage time (UTC), so when I travel around the world, I just setup the timezone and not the time itself.
And now tell me, I should install CygWin, because I don't know this poorly emulated Windows crapability layer.
Take a look at FreeBSD Gnome, for example. I am sure that their patches to make Gnome portable again flow back upstream.
When someone develops an desktop environment that does not restrict users to Linux, you should expect from them to make the system portable. The work to make it run should be minimal.
Wayland is being ported to FreeBSD, too. It is a bit useless though, because of Linuxisms in libinput and Weston.
OpenSSH is portable. This is the difference between Linux and BSD developers. BSD developers stick to the Unix concepts and portability has a high value here. Linux developers invent (mostly already existing) solutions by themselves, multiple times, multiple times in a wrong way and mostly for themselves, because... most Unices/BSDs already have the solutions for the problems and why should they accept something that has to be ported with a lot of effort? It is only being done with things that are worth to port.
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan