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Ask HN: Ultrawide monitors, what's your experience been like?

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Re: Ask HN: Ultrawide monitors, what's your experience been like?

#51
Amazing. I can never go back. Everytime I have to go back to using two monitors it's feels so awkward and unnatural. I didn't think it would have this big of an effect but being able to center windows on the screen and have equal space on the sides really helped my workflow. I'm a programmer. I also got one that is 144hz. It's so smooth. It's such a pleasure to work on. I can read text as it scrolls now! Totally worth the money if you stare at a monitor all day.

I have a 1440p. I would think 4k would not be worth it. Also way to hard to drive

If you have a laptop just make sure it can drive it. And that you have the proper cable. Mine was finicky until I got the proper 8k dp cable.

Re: Ask HN: Ultrawide monitors, what's your experience been like?

#52
I use a 32" 4K monitor (LG UltraFine 32UL950-W) directly in front (landscape), and an identical 32" 4K monitor to the right (portrait) off a rMBP 2016, which gives me the best of both worlds. (Both running Retina mode at logical 1900x1080.)

The landscape monitor is for the usual tasks, and the portrait monitor for coding (100 visible code lines in 15pt Operator Mono in VScode).

A fantastic combination.

Re: Ask HN: Ultrawide monitors, what's your experience been like?

#53
I went a different way and bought a 42" 4K display¹ (that's roughly the same PPI as 27" @1440p, so 100% zoom on Windows or Linux is just fine, no UI scaling nonsense).

So basically I have 42 inches (107 cm) worth of diagonal in front of me:

Height: 20.84" (≈53 cm); Width: 37.05" (≈94 cm); PPI: 103.64 (≈41 pixel/cm).

This gives me 476x118 lines (476 = 5.95 × 80 chars!) in full-screen terminal using small-enough fonts² (no reading difficulty here, productivity/comfort > all). Key thing being, vertical space versus a much shorter ultrawide (but about as much horizontal real estate). I think it matters a lot for coders, sysadmins, people who look at text (code, logs), long lists and tables in general.

I must confess that I feel slightly constrained by this monster in a way I hadn't anticipated: whereas real estate is never much of an issue, what I'd call "lack of separation of concerns" emerges: most Desktop Environments are not designed to manage several spaces, at best you get quick quarter-screen resizing for a window but that's weak when you have room for almost 4×1000 pixels horizontally (and more than 2000 horizontal). Remember, this isn't like your typical laptop at 4K: you really have all those pixels to work with at 100% scaling.

So you'd want more avanced features, and moving to e.g. i3 (Linux DE, or rather WM) begins to make a lot of sense.

The software is necessary to managing all that real estate, and it's a little bit of a desert because we haven't really moved to the "wall of screens", "cover my field of view" paradigm just yet. If you like tinkering and use Linux you probably can get 80-99% of the way there though, depending on how demanding you are.

____

But beyond that I think I'll eventually extend this setup to a 3-screen config, with two side 24" displays in portrait mode (which at 1080p unscaled, or 1440p scaled by 1.25, yields almost the exact same PPI as the middle 42.5" juggernaut). Something like that, with either 2×B or 2×C for obvious symmetry:

    ┌───┬───────┬───┐ A: 2160p 100%, PPI 103.64
    │24"│  42"  │24"│ B: 1080p 100%, PPI  91.79
    │ B │   A   │ C │ C: 1440p 125%, PPI  97.91
    └───┴───────┴───┘    (C = 1152×2048 usable)
This would allow me to put things "aside" literally so — monitoring and tracking, ref docs/notes, previews... Things I'd rather not move or rarely so.

I would never trade my uninterrupted 42" for the little convenience of optional separation, but I'm definitely considering adding this to that.

I strongly recommend you look at this option because it's made me virtually unobstructed by anything display-related since I've had it (small thing: I wish it had more DP/mDP inputs).

A smaller version of this setup has a 37" landscape in the middle and 2x21" portaits on the sides.

[1]: Dell P4317Q with up to 4 simultaneous 1080p inputs https://www.monitornerds.com/dell-p4317q-review/

[2]: Adobe Source Code Pro 9pt, which at 100% with forced 104 DPI to fit the display yields a pretty legible font size. I do most web browsing at 100% or even sometimes less for density.

Re: Ask HN: Ultrawide monitors, what's your experience been like?

#54
I've been using inexpensive ~40-inch-diagonal 4K (3840×2160) televisions as monitors for quite a few years and will continue to do so. Current one is TCL 43S405 (wife commandeered the Sony 43X800E). A single monitor makes for far less configuration fuss — multiple monitors coerce distinct assignments and as well introduce discontinuities in the midst of the workspace (of which I was once tolerant, but no longer). I have yet to try anything in the 50-inch diagonal range, which would likely work but the periphery might go largely unused.

Re: Ask HN: Ultrawide monitors, what's your experience been like?

#56

I doesn't work for me, but that's probably very application-specific. I'm not a dev nor a graphic/video artist, my work is motly editing office docs. Why it didn't work for me: 1- OSes are rather bad at handling large monitors. You can't just dumbly Maximize anymore, which is what I always do. Windows positions don't get memorized so your screen is a permanent mess. 2- I need the doc I'm working on, sources, and soci…

There is software to resolve issue 1 with keyboard or mouse/trackpad shortcuts for nearly all OSes.

can you recommend any good for windows? powertoys doesn't work for me.

Re: Ask HN: Ultrawide monitors, what's your experience been like?

#58

I cannot go back to 27” - ultrawide is game-changing for me. Basically, it comes down to working on 3 interfaces seamlessly, versus two with a single screen. Think REFERENCE, ACTION, SOURCE/DESTINATION. Couple that with using Spectacles (for Mac) to move windows in position with the keyboard, and Mouseless App to master keyboard shortcuts, and you’re flying. I considered ditching my ultrawide to buy the new iMac 5K 2…

I was actually looking at that exact model LG, good to hear from someone that owns one.

Re: Ask HN: Ultrawide monitors, what's your experience been like?

#59

I have a Dell U3818DW and you'd have to pry it out of my cold, dead fingers. I can be working on a document with Word in the middle, a relevant Visio drawing to the left, and an Excel spreadsheet I need some analysis numbers from on the right. It is joy incarnate. I have VFIO setup so I can run Linux as my main OS and Windows in a VM with GPU passthrough for basically bare-metal speed. The Dell can either switch to t…

Off-topic but I want to hear more about this VFIO setup.

Re: Ask HN: Ultrawide monitors, what's your experience been like?

#60
I'm using a Dell U3419w (34 inch ultra wide).

I'm a web dev, I love it, it is effectively windows at a time. It helps that there is a built in KVM, and it works great as a USB hub with USB-C.

The software to manage window placement is extremely helpful as well.

I go to work with a dual monitor setup and am kinda underwhelmed / annoyed.

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