At 20:01:23 on Tuesday Tuesday 15 December 2009, Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> wrote:
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
Thank you, Felix.
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
What are you doing, Felix?
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/
Disclaimer: My rejoinders to Felix's remarks above are made in the spirit of humor and fun, I have had a good laugh at the truth. Thanks, Mr Mazda. But in more seriousness, I have been reminded in an off-forum email that Novell promotes the freebie openSuSE as a laboratory and test bed for its lucrative commercial product, partly to weed out excessively ebullient attempts to push the envelope, aka The Bleeding Edge. I would be very surprised if someone back there in Salt Lake City isn't assessing the user reaction to the advent of KDE4, and I would not bet money that the "New and Improved Desktop of the Future" will make it into the product that has to be sold to paying customers that have their own bottom line to consider. Here, it's "We created it, like it; you can like it or lump it". Two years from now in SuSE, KDE4 may be a very different and more user-friendly creature -- after undergoing some of the customer research eschewed by (no names, please). At that point, we may have a much more usable desktop here too. -- Stan Goodman Qiryat Tiv'on Israel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org