change

Seems that one of the main reasons I had little problem adapting to KDE4 and GNOME 3 had to do with something I read in a book some years ago -- one of Octavia Bulter's science fiction novels. One of her characters was saying something along the lines of how "Change" is gonna happen no matter what, and the thing is to prepare yourself and position yourself to take advantage of that.

A simple idea, but it struck me as profound at the time, and I kinda decided to try to have that sort of outlook in my life.

It was an idea that was in the back of my mind when I decided to learn to use Linux. And while using Linux, it's had a lot do with my deciding to spend time with different distros, DEs, and WMs, and to try to become comfortable with .rpm distros as well as the Debian distros that I started out with.

So I wasn't all that tied down to KDE 3 or GNOME 2, and I've adapted to KDE 4 and GNOME 3 quite easily.

I really feel that my being open to Change -- preparing for its eventuality, positioning myself for it, embracing it -- has really allowed me to be more accepting than a lot of other people of the directions that KDE and GNOME have taken. So many of the comments I saw about KDE 4, and that I'm seeing about GNOME 3, are along the lines of, "It isn't KDE 3," or "It isn't GNOME 2." "It isn't what I'm used to," "It isn't like what we've been using all along."

And folks feel that the changes were forced on them. But that's usually how Change happens. Change doesn't usually stop and ask, "You gonna be okay with this?" It just comes, and if you haven't prepared yourself for it, you're gonna get blindsided by it, and you're gonna find yourself longing for the way things used to be.