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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.
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.
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.
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...