On 2009/12/15 11:02 (GMT+0100) Sven Burmeister composed:
The big difference between people and how they work is not due to age but only mental flexibility and attitude towards changes.
Exactly. I'm not as old a fart as Stan, but we old farts are in a class where mental flexibility cannot be assumed. Some people are luckier than others. Those less lucky stick with what they understand out of necessity, and learn new paradigms less easily, if at all. Forcing us inflexible types to "upgrade" to a rebuilt from scratch DTE with wholesale paradigm changes and minimal resemblance to the familiar is no small problem that we did not invite. "We" didn't upgrade out of a choice to get the latest &/or greatest. "We" upgraded out of necessity, among the reasons: 1-old OS version dropped from "support", and its update repos disappeared 2-old HD died, taking with it the NLS OS and installed updates 3-old puter broke; req'd hdw support missing in familiar version for newer hdw 4-printer broke, and the new one wasn't supported by the available older drivers Newer isn't necessarily better. Stan, like me, came to Linux from OS/2. Unlike Stan, I've not yet completely left it, e.g. writing this with SeaMonkey on eCS. Stan was _probably_ forced to leave OS/2 due to death of old hardware, combined with difficulty getting OS/2 installed on modern hardware using his attenuated mental flexibility; or need for USB devices lacking OS/2 support (printer makers seem to have forgotten what an LPT port is). Like Stan, and many KDE3 users, I understand the value of "just works", and cringe when I hear buzzwords like "dated" or "feels old" or new words like "plasmoid" as justification to abandon the tried, trusted & familiar. IBM tried to kill OS/2, and guess what, it still lives on more than two decades after its birth as eComStation 2.0RCsilver. KDE3 users just haven't yet AFAIK had the luck of OS/2 users in finding a Serenity Systems parallel. Their hands haven't yet been sufficiently forced. The die hards still have optional repos to fall back on, and in probably most cases 11.0 & 11.1 users can resist the urge to "upgrade". Plus, some have bought more time with the Oct 09 CentOS release or Lenny. -- " We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion." John Adams, 2nd US President Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org