It makes me sad to see desktops begin to go by the wayside. It's not so much a matter of what one can and can't do on tablets or smartphones, its that people rarely OWN their device like I OWN my PC. I built it and I can do whatever I want with it and no walls stand in my way. Buy a smartphone on contract and suddenly walled gardens everywhere, locked boot loaders and locked stores and apps where communities wall themselves off. Even if you buy a tablet off contract where you can load whatever you want, the device itself will still be obsolete much faster than a PC which I can keep upgrading for years.

It's incredibly frustrating to see 3D printing, arduino, etc which promise to free us from typical manufacturing paradigms coming along, and also see electronics (and the internet), once a bastion of intellectual freedoms, begin slipping under new regulations, contracts, walled gardens, etc. I want to really own the things I own. I want to be able to run the programs I want to run on the OS I want on the hardware I choose!

Sigh...