And not only that, but that desktops and laptops will be dead in 2-5 years. Better tell Apple (iPhone/iPad people) to rethink its Mac marketing strategy, and Microsoft (Windows Mobile people) to not waste so much money promoting and developing PC software.

Different display size, different fonts installed on both systems, different Chrome versions?

A common practice is to use different different styling CSS files for different types of devices/displays. The differences in CSS MIGHT be the cause?

Again, it's purely down to web designers whether they design/code a responsive website (eg. a website which adapts layout depending on a display size)

This forum is one of the few forums I have trouble with, interestingly the other two are technical forums.

The other forums work like a charm on my mini tablet, probably because their webmasters are not lost in a religious war against the tablet but get down to business and get the job done.

I think real computers are here to stay. Sure, mobile devices are here to stay too, but they all serve different purposes. Perhaps the old Intel and AM dominance will be over soon, now that the ARM platform has gained so much foothold thanks to Android, but there is a limit to what you can do with a wearable device.

Give me a laptop or a powerful desktop any time to do some real work!

Eric

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It is trivial to unlock the bootloader. All it takes is to reboot the device in recovery mode, connect the device to a PC running the Android SDK and run the executable 'fastboot' (no, I haven't tried it myself but I will try it soon).

The only real problem would be running a native Linux distribution. If one was happy with a less purist approach and run just the userspace in a chroot, than this could be the start of something. One could take the Ubuntu installer, reverse-engineer it and try to install Slackware the same way.

It's nothing to do with the webmasters being "in a religious war" and I'm surprised that this is even being discussed. The webmasters are using perfectly good PHP as they always have done. The problem is that the browser you are using is inferior.
The main difference I am talking about is because the programmers of the iPad browser can't do their job properly. That's it. End of story. Don't believe me?
http://www.everythingicafe.com/forum...-zooming.8403/
I'm surprised that they haven't been taken to task for disability discrimination for not allowing a larger font size without the hassle of zooming all over the place.
The whole point of HTML is that the browser can, and does, do things with the text that the web designer may not have envisaged including, but not limited to, changing font sizes and reflowing paragraphs.

I'll say it again:
The web has been around for years before tablets came along and these types of forum have worked properly in browsers of all types on all different types of screen from IE on Win2K on a 640*480 to Firefox 22 on Debian Sid with kernel 3.8 on a 1920*1200 wide screen. The pages are fine. That the people coding mobile browsers are unable to reflow text is their failing. I wouldn't mind but, as I mentioned, Windows phone edition used to do it 8 years ago.

Edit:
Below is what my iPad can't reflow, the most problem I'm talking about as it's the most obvious.
Any browser incapable of reflowing that last paragraph is faulty by design.

Let me weigh in here with my own 2 cents:

I own a Nexus 7, and while I find it to be useful for certain tasks, like checking the weather, and some kinds of games, I most certainly wouldn't say that tablets will replace traditional desktops and laptops, simply because the peripherals used with them (keyboard,mouse,etc) are still useful for serious computing. The mouse has been around for the better part of 50 years, and the keyboard for even longer. The reason that these have been around for so long is that they allow basic, but essential, interaction with a computer. Touch screens have yet to set a track record for reliability and long-term usefulness. That's not to say they won't, but to say that tablets will be the defacto way to compute, and that the desktop/laptop will be obsolete is going a wee bit too far too soon. When tablets have proven themselves over the long run, then this topic will most certainly be revisited, and then, ottavio, you will have your opportunity to tell the rest of us that "I told you so!"

In the meantime, you might want to avoid putting your foot in your mouth by making such ostentatious statements.

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Ottavio has just announced his intention to leave LQ, and he's mentioned that this thread was a factor:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...lq-4175476901/

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Why do people come in here get upset when they can't 'change' slackware. Why not just go off to a project of your liking and participate there? Ottavio clearly doesn't "get it" with regards to what slackware is all about. How many times has someone come on here and said "the sky is falling" or "OMG you don't do dependency resolution, you are destine to fail!"

We are all still here. The project appears more stable and more capable than ever. When laptops were first introduced like 30+ years ago it was predicted that there would be no more desktops. Baloney - here I am in the year two thousand fricking thirteen typing on one.

One thing I've learned about slackware is it's going to keep it simple and stay true to it's fundamentals. It doesn't necessarily want to be everything for everyone, and I like that.

Honestly, SLACKWARE WILL FAIL BECAUSE PCS WILL FAIL AND THERE WILL BE NOTHING TO RUN SLACKWARE ON WITH 5 YEARS OMG YOU MARK MY WORDS was one of the sillier positions I've seen here.

3 members found this post helpful.

The problem with porting anything to a new device is getting resources, a dedicated team, and even testers with hardware available to even start such an undertaking.

Look back at how much work went into porting Slackware to the s390 platform. Even look at the work done by the Slamd64 team to port Slackware to AMD64.

The work is a lot, and it's not magically easy to do.

I don't have any problems with Slackware being ported to another device, but honestly, you have to look at how feasible it is to do so.

Just jumping in to add my two cents to this fairly old thread :-)

I have spent quite a bit of time in the last few years pondering where the world of computing is going - specially in terms of the ascendency of ARM based stuff and that of the (mainly) small screen touch-based stuff. There clearly is a place and a need for these devices - demonstrated by how many people buy them and use them. Yes, of course, a lot of this use is not exactly productive or "serious" stuff - but being able to browse the Internet quickly on an ultra-portable device is quite useful - no matter how you look at it.

HOWEVER - and this is a big however from where I'm standing - the world of smartphones/tablets and generally the ARM based stuff is one gigantic black-hole for sucking up development resources big time. ARM itself as a CPU architecture might be nice and open - but the huge and continuous variation in the architecture of devices using it means that the said openness is squandered. Just look around - every single device and variation of device needs a separately produced OS image. You can't just download one ARM image (like cd/dvd iso's in the world of x86/x64) - and install it on any ARM device. Every single time a new router/tablet/smartphone is released - a whole team of hackers have to work at porting Android/OpenWRT or whatever Linux based distro to that particular device. You can't just install the generic one.

Imagine if x86/x64 would work like that. Each and every laptop or desktop model needing separate development effort! Jeeez.

All of the above means that, in the real world, developing for ARM based stuff seems to be like on never-ending game of starting all over again for each device. In terms of resources ploughed into it - it seems we are not so far from the days when people had to completely reverse engineer proprietary stuff.

All of that means that until (if ever) the ARM platform doesn't stabilize a bit and doesn't start following some standards which would result in much more re-use of code - developing for it is one massive waste of time.

The above is based on what I can work out so far from looking at various distro's and software for ARM. It would also seem that Linus Torvalds was bursting a vein for rather similar reasons this week (which ended up all over the web) - unless I've misread his posts. I might not entirely agree with the way he expresses it - but I can see exactly why he thinks what's going on with the ARM world at the moment is complete lunacy in terms of waste of development resources.

So in short, although I might want to use my favourites distro on more portable form factors - I can't see, personally, much reason for Slackware spending quizillion man/woman/goldfish hours porting to iPhone/Galaxy/One/Blade/Someberry/Whatever - just so that they have to start all over again when the hardware manufacturer slightly upgrades their platform.

Oh - and the fact that Linux doesn't yet have a a mature Desktop Environment / Windows Manager optimized for small/touch devices doesn't help either.

Definitely on this particular nostalgic freak's desktop and laptop.

No. Got a Nokia (should that be M$ now?) dumb 'phone.

I don't want a phone that thinks it is smarter than me, because it is wrong and I am right, and it's full of malware to boot.

I actually like "smart" phones though my current mobile phone is regarded as a "feature phone". That's because I don't have an awful lot of use fro a telephone most of the time but I like to have email and the internet available to me all day.
However, the OSs on "smart" phones would be horrendous to use on a desktop as you can only use one application at a time and they're so dumbed down that you can't change anything.
Oddly, my older "smart" phones using Windows phone edition were less locked down than the current Android phones.