Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers

You'll have to excuse the mess :) https://imgur.com/a/5uTm7VB

Also obviously I hid all the proprietary stuff.

As someone who's largely stuck with middle of the road hardware for financial reasons, i find that 1080p monitors are the sweet spot between having the screen estate for my programs and plenty of text on the screen, but also graphics performance if i ever want to do something else - from watching movies, doing 3D modelling or 3D printing, to gaming without resolution scaling.

Of course, i splurged a little bit on an RX 570, so currently i have multiple monitors connected to my PC, two stacked vertically, one on my PC case to the side, and another turned in portrait orientation to the other side. Personally, that setup works for me, since the way OSes do window snapping and tiling is inconsistent, so it's easy to work in both Windows and Linux with multiple monitors, without trying to split everything up into smaller zones or trying to use a tiling window manager.

However, if you want to customize things further (e.g. Windows doesn't really do vertically stacked snapping zones), the PowerToys FancyZones is suitable for this, whereas at least some Linux desktops can probably be customized to do this too (without spending too much time, i think LXDE didn't let you alter it that much, or another DE/WM, though my memory might fail me here).

There's something immensely useful about having one monitor for previewing the webpage or software that i'm working on, one for writing the code or using my Git client of choice, and another for anything from documentation, chat apps in the background or even just watching a video.

I'd say that the biggest problem with this setup is that i needed to make my own VESA mounts and a stand out of some PVC tubing and PLA plastic (3D printed and screwed on with bolts), since the options for any sort of custom monitor configuration out there are limited, if you don't want to spend a lot of money on it.

I did a 55" 8k for a bit but that was too physically big so looking at the edges was weird. 43" is probably a lot better in that regard but for me that turned me off single large displays instead of arrays.

In the end I ended up with 6 displays in a 3x2 arrangement: 3x 1440p + 1x 4k on the primary PC and 1x 1440p + 1x 4k on the secondary PC and then I used Input Director so it feels like all 6 are one big computer when using the keyboard/mouse (used to use Mouse Without Borders but Input Director is far superior these days). I like this setup more because it gives me a larger primary monitor on each computer to work off of but leaves me separate monitors to put secondary things on. This comes with the bonus that fullscreen doesn't mean "and everything else must be gone" yet I still have the bigger primary display to fullscreen with.

General note I've fallen in love with https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B082845XM8/ as it's simple, cheap, and extremely sturdy.

I mean, sure, you are probably going to be 80-90% on any monitor that doesn't hurt your eyes (crappy refresh rate) and can support bitmapped graphics (not just a TTY terminal display). But having lived through multiple iterations of displays starting from plain old TTYs (4 inches at that!), I really appreciate display advancements and getting access to better/bigger ones.

Not sure why, when every flagship phone has rounded corners, we don't all use circular monitors. It completely solves the rotation issue, and is stylish too.