Great post! Yep that's exactly what they're saying. To increase productivity, I must replace all my 32" and 40" 3840x2160 monitors with 15" 1024x768 ones! These 16:9 monitors can only display a third of an A4 page, but a 15" 4:3 monitor can display the entire page nicely! I can't believe I wasted well over $1k on these monstrosities!
I wasn't always "horizontally organized". Lots of us grew up using 4:3 CRTs with 800x600 or even lower. When we used a word processor for Windows 3.1, we maximized the window and fit the page width across the screen. We kept doing that for 1024x768, 1280x1024 and even 1600x1200. Then these "square screens" were gradually phased out by widescreens. People who held on to their old habits (maximizing the window and fitting the page width) hated widescreens because they could see much less of the page. But I worked around this by using only a portion of the screen for one window and the rest for something else, and realized I preferred seeing two windows in parallel. My first widescreen was just 1280x800, so the two windows overlapped partially, and for Word documents and PDFs I had to choose the "fit text width" option instead of "fit page width", but that's still better than viewing just one maximized window. Later, as widescreen resolutions kept increasing, I tiled more and more windows on the screen, not just horizontally but also vertically.dr_st wrote: ↑Mon Dec 30, 2019 4:30 amPianowizard, which I conclude from the various discussions we've had on the forums over the years, is what some people call a "horizontally organized" person, who prioritizes desktop space over everything else. In computer screens where the pixel is the basic unit, desktop space = resolution, so to him it's all about increasing it, and aspect ratio matters not. If you give him a 4:3 screen with 8000x6000 pixels, I'm sure he would prefer that.
On 40" 3840x2160 displays it's easy to tile a bunch of windows without scaling, but things look tiny on high-DPI laptop displays, so many users maximize the active window and scale things way up, thereby sacrificing real estate. This brings us to your next two sets of comments, and my response:
Eyesight has got to be a factor, e.g. the millions of people suffering low vision certainly wouldn't be able to do what I do with high-DPI screens no matter how hard they try.dr_st wrote: ↑Mon Dec 30, 2019 4:30 amSo essentially you do say that it's not really about how good one's eyesight is, since you claim your eyesight to be below average, and my eyesight has been consistently (*knock-on-wood*) rated above average, and I know that I would not feel comfortable with something like 1440p on 14" at 100% scaling in Windows...I don't know how you do it. Maybe your definition of "average" eyesight differs from the accepted scale...
According to eye exams I have 20/20 vision, but as you know these exams use black letters against a white background to maximize contrast, and the optometrist gives us plenty of time to look at each letter, so I can squint and take several seconds to identify each letter. In real-life situations I know for a fact that most people around me can see better than I, e.g. at seminars I can see the screen well only in the front rows, while my colleagues can see fine all the way in the back.
You make it sound like I didn't get anything done during those years of practice! Of course I kept working while practicing; this is not like the piano, where I need to practice a piece for months before I can perform it at a recital or shoot a video for YouTube. And it didn't really take years, but more like a few weeks in 2006 to adjust to 147.0 DPI (Dell Inspiron 6000), a few weeks in 2007 to adjust to 170.7 DPI (QXGA mod for the R50p), and a few weeks in 2014 to adjust to 221.9 DPI (Vaio VGN-P530CH) -- these were the three significant DPI jumps I experienced. There was actually a fourth jump, when I bought the Dell Inspiron 15-7568 convertible (282.4 DPI) in 2016, but using 100% scaling on it seemed so daunting that I gave up immediately and settled for 125% scaling. Someone with better vision than I might be able to conquer 282.4 DPI, and this is another example of eyesight being a factor. Note that I said *a* factor, not *the* factor. Obviously determination also matters.dr_st wrote: ↑Mon Dec 30, 2019 4:30 am...Maybe it really is a matter of 'lots of practice over many years'. If it's the latter case, however, I am not sure that I would want to invest into this kind of practice, and honestly, I can't see why anyone else would either. The productivity lost during those 'many years' of practice would hardly ever be regained by using the ultra-high-DPI-ultra-small-print screen later on...
Don't worry, even when a 14" 16:9 laptop has the smallest bezel possible, it's still wide enough to accommodate a keyboard with full-sized keys.