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

I have an LG 43" display at work, which probably uses the same panel as the Dell monitor.

It generally works as advertised, but sitting at distance one would normally site from a monitor (as demonstrated on Dell's marketing in the parent post), the extreme edges of the display aren't visible, because they're in the shadows of the bezel.

This is generally just a mild annoyance, but it can be workflow-impacting. For example, I use Ubuntu with the application launcher bar docked to the left side, which means that the dots indicating which application (and how many instances) are open is on the extreme left side of the display. I have to lean to my left in order to see these dots, because they aren't visible when I'm sitting upright and looking directly at the screen.

Also, while I've gotten used to it, sitting at a normal monitor distance involves a lot of vertical head movement.

Overall, I'm satisfied with what I got for the price, but I would have gotten the same 38" ultrawide that I use at home if I had the budget for it.

I've been incrementally tweaking my desktop setup for a decade, and it's always nice to look back and see how much more productive I am than N years ago.

But I'm shocked at what a quantum leap in productivity switching to i3wm was, with an upfront cost that's actually pretty low.

The last piece of my desktop usage that isn't controllable and amenable to incremental improvements is the browser. This is unfortunately a pretty large chunk of my recreational use, so my next mini-projects are probably going to be around investing in getting more familiar with extensions.

I have a 40" 4k monitor that can fit 2 or 3 windows horizontally when helpful, but I agree that its killer feature is how useful the extra height is for coding. I also have two smaller monitors on either side for things like Slack or Github that are often referenced but aren't usually part of "flow" work.

For the longest time, I was using dual 1920x1080 screens.

Eventually, I decided to upgrade and got myself a 31.5" 4k display. That lasted about 6 months before I ditched it for a 34" 3440x1440p Ultrawide.

I found coding on the 4k screen to be just too difficult, I had to scale the text way up for things to be readable. However, since I use a laptop running Fedora which I connect to through a thunderbolt dock, I found one monitor to be much less... finicky than using two (I'd briefly considered getting two 2k screens). So far, I've been much happier with the Ultrawide.

My wife took the big 4k monitor off my hands and is using it with her mac mini. I'll admit, MacOS does appear to do a better job dealing with a 4k screen than Gnome.

I had one for two years. I recently switched back to two 27' inch monitors and I won't ever go back. You'd need to tile it and even then it's not worth it. I don't recommend it, it's too clunky and big. If you're gaming or watching movies on it a lot it's cool, but for coding I'd pass.