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Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays
beeudoublez points out a Google+ post by Linus Torvalds arguing that today's standard laptop display resolution is unreasonably low. He said, "...with even a $399 tablet doing 2560x1600 pixel displays, can we please just make that the new standard laptop resolution? Even at 11"? Please. Stop with the 'retina' crap, just call it 'reasonable resolution.' The fact that laptops stagnated ten years ago (and even regressed, in many cases) at around half that in both directions is just sad. I still don't want big luggable laptops, but that 1366x768 is so last century."
My 7 year old laptop had a 1920x1200 resolution and when I bought a new one a few months ago I had to look all over just to find one that had a 1920x1080 resolution.
We share the same gripe. This was posted from my 8½ year old laptop, which also has WUXGA (1920x1200) resolution. I'm holding out on replacing it until I can get something with more pixels. Shortscreen FHD (1920x1080) is a step downwards, while I want to go upwards in pixels. Luckily, Xubuntu 12.04 runs fine on this old hardware.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Hell, I had a 14" Daytek by Daewoo tube monitor that could handle 1600x1200 in 1996. It's disappointing that it hasn't gotten better.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You know what drives changes like this. People showing they will pay a premium to have it.
By a 2880x1800 or 2560x1600 Retina Macbook, when they sell in numbers, competitors will follow.
You know why there is a 2560x1600 Tablet. Because Apple sold shipping containers full of Retina iPads (2048x1536) and Google took notice and decided to one up them.
Putting your money where your mouth is, trumps whining on a blog every time.
I prefer 16:10 monitors to 4:3 (old-school) or 16:9 ("widescreen HD modern crap").
4:3 works fine for a single-window app, but it's hard to do two side-by-side windows. Even some fullscreen apps don't work well with it. I prefer my text editors to have a lot of horizontal space for text - I threw the 80 columns rule out a decade ago.
Meanwhile, 16:9 is a bit condensed for productivity stuff. For movies and games, 16:9 works fine. But so does 16:10. Movies you can just blackbar, and games look fine on 16:10.
So I find 16:10 to be a good compromise for aspect ratio. It's wide enough to do widescreen movies and side-by-side windows, but not so wide that a fullscreen editor feels stretched. I currently put up with 16:9, since 1920x1080 is about half the cost of 1920x1200, but my ideal setup would be 16:10.
Also, for the mathematically inclined, 16:10 is a close approximation of the golden ratio.
Hell, T61p motherboards fit in the 14" T60 cases which can take a 2048x1536 screen; such FrankenPads are becoming pretty common among those that refuse to give up our pixels when 'upgrading' since the transplant gives us a chance to properly clean and refurbish every single part in the machine in the process.
Note, these were available over 5 years ago.
2048x1536 in a 14" laptop.
5 YEARS AGO!
WTF!?
Defects in silicon can be handled by adding extra redundant logic on the chip that can be rerouted by burning some fuses or even through configuration pins.
Display is different. When there is a defect in the middle of the screen, you cannot just tell the user to look at the extra redundant pixels that you added on the side of the screen and call it a day.
Also the surface area of a display is at least two magnitudes higher than silicon chips.
I see what you've done there. You've taken the word "consumer" and inserted the word "sheep", inventing your own brand new word "consheepmer", in order to suggest that most people who buy things make their decisions based on the decisions of others, rather than carrying out their own in-depth research into all the options available. Well done, you should be proud of yourself.
Do you do anything other than watch movies or play games?
A 4:3 monitor gives a height/width ratio of ~1.3:1
A 16:9 ratio is ~1.7:1
A sheet of A4 paper has a ratio of ~1.4:1.
The 4:3 monitor - used in portrait mode - shows a clean, full-sized sheet of A4 - just nice for DTP, layout, etc. Some of us still do work that results in A4-sized hard copy. Works for A3, A5, and A6, too.
A 16:10 display is two A4 pages side by side. 2560x1600 is 16:10, not 16:9
Also for those of us who work on spreadsheets and diagrams, 16:10 allows us to do A4 and A3 diagrams in landscape mode.
For writing documents, if you want to write one page at a time 16:10 is good as half the page takes up the whole screen, but then again in almost all office packages you have borders of whitespace around the page.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Intel has shown Ivy Bridge running 4K over two DP cables. Video acceleration also works. Haswell has been promised to do 4K over one cable, I hope 3840x2160x60 fps over DisplayPort and not just 3840x2160x24 fps over HDMI 1.4 or maybe HDMI 2.0 will show up - but we'll know in half a year or so. Here's a clip of Haswell decoding a 200 Mbps 4K video stream in hardware, 1% CPU. So by this time next year, mainstream CPUs will be able to do it. Meanwhile people have tested it for gaming, top end cards in CF/SLI will give you okay frame rates. It is also rumored that the PS4 will support 4K video output - not unlikely since Sony also sells 4K TVs now - with that not being said that games will be in 4K resolution, just like the PS3 plays 720p games and outputs 1080p BluRay.
The huge elephant in the closet is of course still the cost of 4K displays. The "Retina" screens add a hefty premium to the 13-15" MBPs, I suspect for a >20 inch 4K monitor you are looking at least $1000 extra, even if Apple plans to make up for it on volume. Remember current 4K monitors are way over $10k, though they're only for special use in industry/medical/military which of course means a huge sticker price. That said, no doubt a $34,999 Eizo monitor is overpriced when you can get LGs 84" 4K TV for $16,999 but still it's a good stretch down to normal consumer prices.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Buy a Nexus 10, install Ubuntu on it, and use an external keyboard. Bonus: you can use it in portrait mode for hacking code, and landscape mode for watching movies. Now if only they'd release the Nexus 13...
I'm still discovering what my 1998 vintage, 21" Compaq P1210 can do. The last version of Mint, I discovered it doesn't top out at 1600x1200 - a new resolution of 1792x1344 came up in the drivers, and it seems to work. I think the phosphor can show that many pixels, because fonts got smaller but still readable.
Now, in 1998 when it was made, I don't think you could get 1600x1200; quite the futureproofed product.
Also, I have to keep it; it doubles as a catwarmer
try 78, so you can email it.
If you're routinely writing ridiculously long lines of code, you should be dragged out back and monkey-stomped until you promise never to do it again. There's VERY little reason for any long line to not be broken up across multiple lines at logical breakpoints. Of course, this is why "larger vertical space" is useful - you see more of the context for the line without having to constantly jigger up and down to see what was happening around the code you're working on.
Very wide text is fundamentally unreadable - there are numerous readability studies that have concluded the "optimum" line length for readability is around 75 characters. Go too much wider than that, and you make your code MUCH harder to read.
This is why I love my Dell 2408WFP - it's getting on a bit now, and the color management isn't as good as it should be (but I have a Huey for that), but it's 16:10 with a resolution of 1920x1200 - absolutely wonderful. I never maximise anything, and mostly have several cascaded portrait shaped windows displayed across it.
Back to topic. I think what Linus actually means is that he wants a higher resolution so that there are no jaggies on fonts, and scrollbars and widgets look sharper. The actual perceived font size (in inches etc.) would be the same - so all these comments about tiny fonts, and 8 way code diffs, are completely missing the point.
Think of it this way, you watch the same movie on a 720p screen, and then on a 1080p screen - do you see more of the movie picture on the latter? No. It's just _sharper_.
-Jar
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The real solution to this is to go back to 80x25 screens, and better short-term memory. You think I'm joking, but I'm not.
I've been developing my own OS from scratch and right now I'm limiting myself to the 80x25 or 80x50ish modes for the primordial in-OS development environment. I agree that 25 lines is about all I need to see at a time. I could do with a bit more horizontal area, but horizontal scrolling makes up for the lack of columns nicely.
The language I've created to build the OS with runs as either compiled or interpreted code, making it easy to create, test, and add new modules in real-time. To this end I use the upper 25 rows for program output / display, and the lower rows for the debugger and "immediate" mode code editor. It's sort of like a limited tiling WM, or GNU screen-ish interface. I used to develop code in DOS based applications decades ago, and initially thought that modern graphical environments were far better suited to development. Naturally, I thought I'd be really cramped for space but it actually has worked out to be more comfortable in comparison. I've got noticeably less eyestrain than when I do my "day job" work in a modern IDE. It seems that what you say is true: 80x25 rows or so is all one really needs with a scrolling display. However, I supplement my short term memory with the additional pane.
Now reconsidering my stance against using console based editors in favor of IDEs for development on "proper" OSs as well...
Everyone in this thread, but you. You know, it's the topic of the thread (and of the story, BTW).
Yeah, sure. I'll carry an extra monitor around with me, sure.
At home, I've got a monitor that is large enough that I can display two A4 pages side by side in 1:1 size, so a widescreen makes sense. For my laptop that would be too large to carry around. A laptop screen is always a compromise between portability and usability. And the 4:3 screen is simply the best compromise unless you use it primarily to watch movies.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.