As a Swede, I've never seen or heard about pillows on desks :D
We do however have a law that workplaces must have some kind of resting area. In my former workplace we had a room with sofas, which sometimes people were napping in.
I use focus-follows-mouse (in fvwm), and the only app I can recall has any problem is Steam, in which the menus disappear if the mouse goes outside the steam window (or perhaps outside the menu, don't remember the details).
I actually didn't like (and still don't) Windows in any form, but the one thing I did/do like is the Windows 95/98/2000 UI. I came from an Amiga background, and even though I think of Amiga with fond memories, I thought the UI was a bit too spartan and clumsy (MUI was a step in the right direction though).
Nowadays I use Memphis-98 [0] as GUI theme (not desktop and window decorations). It's is kinda like Chicago95, but feels a bit more modern, not just a straight copy of Windows. There are some layout bugs, and some apps looks overall bad, like Firefox, Thunderbird and BDeaver. I had to manually turn off theming of DBeaver because it's basically useless with the Memphis theme.
I've started to use the new version 3 on desktop. But it still has got some problems when connecting/disconnecting monitors, so I use version 2 on the laptop where I need to do that.
No DE, unless you count LXQt as a basic session manager. I don't know why, but it seems things works more smoothly with a session manager instead of just starting fvwm from .xsession.
I've used Memphis98 (similar to Chicago95) since it came out. Although just as a GTK-theme, not the entire desktop. Window manager is FVWM and taskbar/panel/session-manager is LXQt, so it's a bit of a Franken-desktop :)
For Qt-apps I use the "Windows" style so they fit together nicely.
Comparing Memphis and Chicago, there are some layout-bugs in Memphis, but I feel like it's overall a bit better balanced than Chicago.
I think all new themes are too bright and flat, Windows 9X was perfect (at least in that regard).
That was probably a Sun machine. I used it them at university and liked the copy/paste-keys too.
I had a PC keyboard (Kinesis Freestyle 2) for a while which had this setup with copy/paste as separate keys. Unfortunately for me, these keys were macro keys which sent "CTRL plus the key at position three on line two" etc, and since I use dvorak layout, the C,X and V keys are mapped to Ä,Q and J, which meant "cut" became "quit" (CTRL-Q).
I don't know how Sun handled this, if the edit-keys sent some specific keycode that the program interpreted like "cut" and not just "CTRL-X"?
Instead of using colors in diffs, why not change the typography? Make removed lines less visible, and added lines more visible, perhaps grey text for removed and bold black for added?
I used Alpine as my main email client for a while. I really like it, but I had problems with Fastmail's LDAP-addressbook. And if I remember correctly I couldn't use Office365's addressbook either.
Another problem was integrating Alpine with calendars (at least O365).
khal (with vdirsyncer) is a nice calendar app. I haven't got it working perfectly with Office635 yet though; I use a read-only url to the calendar, so I can at least see it, but cannot edit it. The Fastmail calendar works.
My solution has been to use the Fastmail website to accept calendar invites, but use khal and vdirsyncer to manager the majority of my calendar. As far as contacts, I believe Fastmail can import and export to vCard, which can be managed locally with khard and vdirsyncer as well. I use khard directly with mutt to access email contacts and I've been happy with it.
To make it a bit less conspicuous, take the third character (or something) from the service name and put it as the fifth character (or something) in an otherwise long random string.
This will look like a random password... until someone gets two or more passwords made with this strategy, then it's pretty easy to find out the strategy.
You only have to remember one password, the strategy is the same for all passwords, replace the fifth character (for example):
google: mojko2if6bibe78
youtube: mojku2if6bibe78
yahoo: mojkh2if6bibe78
Note that I don't advocate this strategy for high-security applications, but for throwaway accounts that you might want to access when not having access to your password manager it might be useful.
We do however have a law that workplaces must have some kind of resting area. In my former workplace we had a room with sofas, which sometimes people were napping in.