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

Ultra wide is like having two screens, when splitting windows left and right, though I think two monitors is better for work, as you can put one as the primary and one off to the side, you don't want to be looking sideways when working on code.

When I was reading a lot of code I didn't write, the 4k was the best, as it had a lot of vertical space.

The ultra wide I bought for games (it's 120hz).

I'm about to start a new gig and I'll run 2x23.8" 1080p for that.

Phillips make decent 4k screens at 40" and 43" for the money, but they are glossy so no good if you have glare problems.

The nicest screens overall for work I find are the Dell ultra sharp line. They are premium in price but side by side to a cheaper monitor and you can see why!

I have a 27" ultra sharp that is about 8 years old and is still fantastic compared to most mid range monitors, it's worth the investment. 1x 27" is nice, 2x 23.8" is nice.

Samsung make good ultra wides for work, and they make some ultra ultra wides too!

By day this is a productivity powerhouse, currently Ubuntu 19.10 with an extremely minimal i3 desktop.

I use the left monitor for terminals and the ultrawide normally the entire expanse for my work in sublime text - on my font settings, I can get five panes of 80-col files side by side. The right monitor is Chrome and F12 for whatever I’m building.

I love my ultrawide. I was very hesitant at first and thought I may dislike it but it actually feels like I want an even larger expanse now! It works well for me, I know some don’t like it and I can see why. Part of why it works so well for me I think is my use of i3 which makes it really easy to fully utilise all the space.

And part 2 of the above... by night it’s running Steam on Windows 10 and it’s absolutely fantastic for gaming, especially the genre I lean towards (driving/vehicle simulation). Since NVIDIA still don’t allow mixed resolution surround, and I want ultrawide for work, ultrAwide gaming was a necessity which turned out to be pretty fantastic. Games like ETS2, ATS and Assetto Corsa feel that bit more immersive with the extra windscreen space. The monitor fills a good part of my vision and as I have trackir too, it’s really quite immersive overall.

Brands or models - Mine is the AOC U3477PQU which was extremely popular but is now sadly discontinued with no replacement. No bad word to say about it. I’m actually planning to buy another ultrawide soon and mount it vertically above the current one; I may end up getting a used U3477PQU again (AOC don’t seem to currently make any non-gaming ultrawides which is odd seeing how many they sold).

So with AOC gone, LG are basically the market leaders and supply panels to many others (AOC included I think) and Dell are also high-end. I know Samsung and Iiyama have some compelling value options at the lower end of the market.

It's great for what I use it for, mostly software development. Only issue I have is that occasionally MacOS decides it can't see it or won't use the full resolution and I have to do a bit of plugging and unplugging.

I might get a smaller 4k monitor on the side. I really value a lot of pixels.

2 x ASUS @ 1920 x 1200 (total: 3840 x 1200) 1 x 42" 4K TCL "TV" @ 1920 x 1080

I (almost) never have a window I want to span monitors (or be larger than a single monitor). I like the organization that the monitors force on me. I use 5 workspaces ("Work", "IRC", "Telegram", "Web", "Music") and in each workspace, the left and right halves (the two ASUS monitors) provide distinct zones within the workspace. In the "Work" workspace, for example, the left side is invariable terminals, the right side is invariable emacs. In the "telegram" workspace, the right side is (Surprise!) telegram, and the left is any other application i need to use while communicating via telegram. Etc. etc.

If I had an ultrawide, it would remove the "bezel" divider between the two ASUS monitors and require me to keep that left/right organization all by myself. Boo.

The TV screen is "special" and not in use normally, but when I use it, it's invaluable because it's huge.

Apart from that, I do really enjoy all the screen real estate. It's nice to be able to have a full-sized browser window and two instances of VS Code all running within a visible portion of the screen. That being said, I'd easily give it up for a reasonably priced 27in 5K display that works over DisplayPort. The extra screen space is nice, but I'd much rather a display that had crisp, high-DPI text.