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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

16:9 is suboptimal for me. I usually like one extra display in portrait orientation for code and web pages.

My current 16:9 24" 4k display in portrait is too tall---have to move my head up and down a lot, and too skinny---hard to put two windows side by side comfortably. Have to fiddle with overlapping windows a lot. In landscape it would be too short, and I rarely watch movies on my desktop. One movie trailer a quarter approximately, so optimizing for that use case is absurd.

I would prefer a fatter 16:10 instead, and was happy with the 22" 1920x1200 that was replaced, though I love the increased resolution of the new monitor.

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This is the single reason why I have not made the switch to 4k displays. I simply cannot give up my existing 24" 16:10 monitors.

I use two 24" 4K displays and scale the image to look like 2560x1440 per monitor (macOS). It took a while to get used to the smaller UI, but I love the amount of space I get.

Edit: The rendered viewport per monitor is 5120x2880 (=2560x1440 Retina), so everything is sharp.

4K should be seen as qualitative upgrade over 1920x1080, and I know the pain of trying to work with that few vertical pixels. However 2560x1440 is still 16:9 but the 1440 pixels is enough for me. So my upgrade path will be to 5K (5120x2880).

If you care about aspect ratio, your monitor is too small. On a sufficiently large and sufficiently high-resolution monitor, the edges of the display no longer define the viewport; you just draw the windows at whatever aspect ratio you like. We have pixels to burn these days.

By your definition, any monitor that doesn't fill your entire FOV is too small.

Pretty much, yes.

That is already starting to happen in some sense. I've got a 38" monitor (4K resolution) and I sit about 2 feet from it. Regularly, I miss mail notifications in the top-right corner.

As I mentioned the monitor is already too tall, and not wide enough. I don't need a bigger monitor I need a squarer one.

In fact my old monitor was smaller (22") and I liked it better except for the lower resolution. Why? Because I could tile two windows side by side in portait. Docs and code, no fiddling, very little scrolling, and very productive.

I guess I could ignore the top few inches of my monitor but that is somewhat of a pain because of what happens on window maximization.

>I guess I could ignore the top few inches of my monitor but that is somewhat of a pain because of what happens on window maximization.

Windows has lousy built-in tools for laying out windows. Try AquaSnap, or script something with AutoHotKey.

I wish they would still make 4:3 laptops. I love my trusty old T61!

I would take that over 16:9.

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