I'm with you

You lost me... I would hope/presume that Yammer doesn't carry over the imposed message length limitations (which has fascinating effects, but productivity wise it's pretty bad by itself and the stuff *worth* archiving would have to be hosted by... something else. I think a message board system would be more appropriate here. Of course, there is the challenge of managing the very complex access rights inherent in a lot of business communications if you want to adopt a 'twitter' or message board like system. Following that is how to gracefully integrate any internal system with partner companies.... Essentially, business confidentiality concerns severely restrict the scalability of better-than-email systems. Not talking about *hard* security concerns (email is usually not that, though public key integration is often a feature inherent), but avoiding content getting out idly to peers that may induce confusion or incite people one way or another unnecessarily.

Problem being there that sometimes you don't know whether that will be the case until a week from the day of sending.

I agree, but *often* the message devoid of the context provided by a human can lose a lot of its value. It's infeasible to assure that everything in the employee's head lands in the corporate memory independent of the employee (including everything to ad-hoc hallway conversations to background thougths formulated in the bathroom, human nature just is more complex in practice).

Thanks for that. I do wish the window previews were a bit more usably large (as it stands, the thumbnail is just too small to make out wtf it is).

The alt-tab behavior you describe is vanilla, but when you have dozens of terminals and you *know* a substring in a title, a search is more effective than traversing. If referring to it being a substitute for 'show all windows for an app', the problem being the UI in compize/kde uses maybe 90% of screen real estate to facilitate decipherable previews, where alt-above-tab uses maybe 15% of the screen real estate and the rest is pretty much unused.

Why? I can see it keeping some 2k8r2 shops from jumping ship because 2012 does a few things like ReFS mitigating the advantages of ZFS and (future) btrfs, but I don't see anything to induce non-Windows shops to jump aboard all of a sudden. 2k8r2 already has virtualization, so maybe 2012 gets some capability to be more competitive, but those vmware shops that are willing to jump ship have largely already done so (to KVM either in Free or RedHat backed configurations mostly). The overwhelmingly large base that sticks with VMWare that is still out there isn't looking to jump platforms unless VMWare royally screws up.

In terms of form factor, most any 'real work' is unsuitable for a tablet or phone device. Among the people who do indeed use it for 'real' work, probably more than half do it out of blind zealous devotion to the device rather than of practical considerations. If you have to do any significant amount of text/data entry, you are doing yourself a disservice by using touchscreen-only devices. Also, fitting your work into sub-10-inch display territory when it is perfectly reasonable to let it be more than twice that.

'The cloud' as MS imagines and Windows 8 facilitates is, however, MS' wet dream.... if they can win. Suddenly, not only does MS have a monopoly on your application platform, they get a monopoly on the data you manage with it. Suddenly they not only have more stuff to mine for revenue, but in addition to worrying about if you can find a calendar app in a competing OS that can manage your schedule, now your schedule itself is stuck in MS servers.

I doubt it will flame out though. I think it should fail in many respects and particularly in digital media context royally screws up the concept of 'ownership', but it's still clearly happening....

After trying the Win8 customer preview, I think it *won't* do 'just fine', precisely because they are *trying* to be tablet-friendly with a horridly awkward UI concept for desktop. Hell, I don't see how pure touch even works particularly well with Metro.

I guess the question being, what scenario is more productive? If you have small window count of about one window per app, then you probably wouldn't have even *noticed* the difference. If you have a large window count, then how does alt-tab, alt-above-tabe impede productivity? Other arguments I can buy (e.g. encouraging many across-the-screen moves, hiding dock making it more difficult to be 'discoverable', and many other criticisms of gnome 3), but other than 'it's different', I see no technical advantage to alt-tab versus what they provided.

I currently have a modest number of windows open (11). To get to a particular window as a test, it took me 4 keypresses. For me to have gotten to it without hierarchical task switching, it would have taken me 8 keypresses given the current layout. Also, by masking the windows of other apps, more screen real estate is available to preview the windows I want.

Mind you, this is still all significantly worse than a hypothetical scenario with window title search or 'show only windows of a certain app' in 'activities view', where you can both be more precise in query and have more real estate to show the results.

That wouldn't be 'fixed', that would be regressing for the sake of people who hate change just because it is change.

If you are terribly bothered by it:
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/

But once you get used to it, it is a much more scalable mechanism to deal with many windows. Plenty of stuff in Gnome3 frustrates me, but this one I think they got right.

You do realize that the Fedora leadership expressly does *not* want to be part of corporate applications right? From a business perspective, the goal is to have a research and development strategy that takes advantage of enthusiasts willingness to have a less stable environment to test and develop features and concepts that ultimately land in 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux', the most popular 'enterprisy' instance of Linux there is?

I actually grew to like the alt-tab part pretty quickly.

I still miss 'window title search' and 'show all windows for an app' that I had in compiz.....

Also, only allowing configuration through themes and extensions is frustrating...

You may wish to try Cinnamon from Mint, last time I tried it was a tad incomplete though.

Can't stand unity either...... Gnome 3 is the less of the two evils.

There is also always KDE and xfce...

I find it amusing that as a result of this name, I think this kicked off:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Future_Release_Naming

After several tries at getting 'Beefy Miracle' in, and the leadership seemingly forced to accept it. Hence a new naming process.

I suggest office depot/officemax. At least in my neck of the woods they carried some of the higher end laptops that best buy didn't bother with. Also the obvious suggestion of an Apple store. MS store might work, but there isn't one within 250 miles of me so I wouldn't know.

I think it is *key* to try to find a way to actually physically evaluate whatever you narrow it down to. For mobile computing, form factor, weight, balance, rigidity, and other factors are best assessed first-hand.

A tad redundant. Tons of comments saying pretty much the exact same words without additional insight gets a tad old. Besides, unless submitter lives under a rock, they certainly already know about those offerings as Apple is *very* aggressive and savvy about their marketing. Many of the other options do not acheive the same awareness as Apple.

For me, without a pointer device on the home row, it's a non-starter. Therefore mac is off the table, even if it weren't 15-20% more expenisve than comparable quality Lenovo/HP laptops. Before you say the Macs are higher quality, they aren't. They are significantly better build quality than the Lenovo/HP products that are half the price of the Macbooks with comparable specs, but I'm talking about the higher end competitor model lines. The only thing you get is OSX, which actually isn't particularly anything special. Users unsatisfied with Windows in terms of UI flexibility or general architecture would probably be best served by Linux. Those unsatisfied with relative lack of commercial software in Linux would be best served by Windows.

Notably you should try to find a way to actually touch and hold your choice. Particularly your relative may not realize what a 17" laptop would mean for portability.

After having a few laptops ranging from 12 to 17 inches over time, I've found 14" to be what I feel to be a good compromise. 1600x900 display at least. When reasonable, I use an external 22" monitor at 1920x1200, but I wouldn't want to drag aronud the requisite bulk and weight of a 17" laptop again...