4.1.3 with Kubuntu 8.10.
Alt-tab works (but I configured it to show windows and not excessively
trippy hallucinations when it flicks thru them).
Shift-alt-tab does not work - this is a prime example of "cargo cult
engineering", where the GUI impersonates Windows conventions without reading
or understanding the "Common User Access" research that came before them...
Even without the Graphic key raising the root menu, I can keep my fingers on
the keyboard longer than with Windows, and much much longer than with a Mac.
Yeah ... I dearly love Compiz on Gnome but I had to turn it off --
it's not quite stable yet.
I've never owned an Apple product, and I don't intend to start any time soon.
And Linux obviously lined them up and blew them out of the water, right?
I didn't attempt to interject Linux into *that* discusssion. ZDNet is
not a place where I want my name dragged into a flamewar. Besides, the
openSUSE community manager is a regular columnist there.
BTW both Ruby and big batch files like Rake are mondo faster...
If you're on a 32-bit machine and using the "stock" Ruby interpreter,
you can probably pick up a modest speed increase by recompiling the
Ruby interpreter using the GCC "-march=native -O3" options. And of
course you can also get a speed boost for a lot of jobs by using
jRuby. jRuby might be your best bet if you're constrained to run on
Windows for some reason. You get less of a boost from recompiling on a
64-bit machine because the binaries are already compiled knowing
they've got the whole AMD64 / x86_64 architecture to play with. The
tests I ran a week or so ago on my 64-bit machine didn't give me
enough boost from a recompile to be worth the effort.
