Not sure where all the hate for Gnome3 comes from. It works very well for multi-tasking and is even a bit similar to OS X (enough that I move between my Gnome3 / OS X machines with ease). I now have more trouble task-switching in my Win7 VM because I'm spoiled by Expose/Gnome's methods.

At this point, the only iffy design choice that I tweak away is the lack of min/max buttons.

That's been my preference for the last year. KVM on Linux now has snapshot support built-in, and OS X Parallels has had it for a while. So about once a month, I'll make a snapshot and label it "good" with some notes. If there's ever trouble, I can rollback to that snapshot.

For the host operating system, files get written to a backup location via SSH, using a SSH key that can only run the backup program (borg-backup) on the destination server. I have yet to see anything that targets backup software that operates in that fashion (it would need to understand that backups happen via SSH and find a vulnerability in the backup software command on the target).

And the final layer of defense, backups that are on encrypted external drives that go offsite weekly.

Also hoping that AMD Zen will be good. I currently run an Intel i7 4790k at 4GHz with DDR3-2100., so the AMD chip would have to have equivalent or better single-core performance with 8-12 cores and DDR4. I'm happy with the i7, but I wish it had ECC, and the 32GB limit on the motherboard is starting to feel constraining.

More cores can also be useful for running unit testing (via something like NCrunch) in the background. On the 4-core VM that I develop in, 3 are dedicated to NCrunch and VS2015 only gets 1.

Production in late 1945 was closer to 2-3 plutonium cores per month, not one. Weapon counts were measured in the hundreds by 1950 and tens of thousands by 1960.

Slack is a private chat client for use with teams of employees. It's a lot like multi-media capable IRC chat, with direct messages, pre-created channels, but with the ability to paste in images, code fragments, multi-line comments, youtube links, etc.

We use it, it works very well and is cross-platform. You can also tie it into GitHub (to announce when an issue is created/closed, or a pull request is created), as well as tying into other systems.

You could probably do all this with IRC, but Slack does it in a more polished fashion that just works.

Some places in the US allow you to reserve seats, those are usually the higher priced locations.

The non-free absolutist stance from Debian is why I prefer to run a downstream like Ubuntu Gnome. Sometimes the free drivers are just not up to the task and you have to go with a proprietary blob. I've got 3 different machines running Ubuntu Gnome, and none of them have had hardware issues.

The Ubuntu driver manager also handles non-GPU driver blobs (which are few and far between).

Two words - "Novell" and "Microsoft". Novell, widely hated by most at the time, bought out the company that produces SUSE back in 2003. Then they signed that patent agreement with Microsoft in 2006.

They're pretty much a distant 3rd in the enterprise Linux market.

I suggest waiting for the T450/T550 to hit the street. Even without the retro styling, the biggest change seems to be the re-introduction of physical mouse keys at the top of the touchpad. Which is the biggest annoyance that I have with the 540 series.

Yeah, I have a T540p with the big spring-loaded touchpad acting as buttons. You can (somewhat) adjust the size of the area that counts as a "left-click". Hopefully this is just a passing fad as they are re-introducing the buttons on some models.

Looks like the T550 series will have physical mouse buttons again.

One protection for that is to have the bank send you an email every day listing all of the transactions against the card. If you're getting emails about transactions on days that you didn't use the card, then you have early warning that someone else has your card details.